DESCRIPTION

Mauka (Hawaiian for “to the mountain”) explores what happens when June Nakashima and Max Nelson, two old friends separated by sixty years and thousands of miles, reconnect in Hilo, Hawai‘i. It’s a love story about old age that takes seriously the bodies, the histories, the diminishments, the unexpected discoveries, as two old loners join in running, hiking, being sexual and writing about it all, including their narrow escapes from death in the great 1960 Hilo tsunami. It’s also a novel about the long life of violence: how a rape kept silent reshapes a personality; how a death kept secret reshapes another; how both the 2018 eruption of Kileauea volcano and the enormous dormant volcano Mauna Kea, on whose high barrens and forested lower slopes much of the novel is set, offer a kind of scale against which human wrongdoing can be held.

PRAISE

“There are two types of novels set in historical or geographical locations: one where the author is clearly winging it, and the other when they have such a firm hold on the specifics of time and location and historicity that the reader feels as if they’ve shared the experiences of the characters. Mauka is distinctively the latter, a nuanced look at violence in its many forms and ramifications: geological, physical, sexual, cultural, and tectonic. It’s also a love story, however fraught, as any good love story is bound to be.” —Sean Beaudoin, author of Welcome Thieves

“The central characters in Mauka are runners, a man and a woman in their 70s. This is no mistake. The book is about running into and out of the past, away and toward the truth (or at least the facts), around the circuits of lives. It is a book about connections. As June, narrator and central character, notes early on: ‘I didn’t want to leave him. I felt connected, a new thing for me.’ It’s also a detective novel, in the manner of Oedipus Rex; characters investigate crimes only to discover their own complicity in them. The book is set in Hilo, a town of dark histories, on the island of Hawai`i, which is one of the few places on earth regenerating (and, sometimes, destroying) itself. There’s a tender, late love story, and a plot that doesn’t insist on neat, final connections. As Pema Chödrön writes in one of the headnotes: ‘...the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and fall apart.’ Don Mitchell makes room for both to happen.” —Susan M. Schultz, Emerita Professor of English, University of Hawai`i-Mānoa