Mauka (Hawaiian for “to the mountain”) is a novel about the things we bury to keep going, and what it costs to finally set them down. It 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 about the long tail of violence: how a sexual assault kept silent reshapes a personality, and how a death kept secret reshapes another.

It’s also a love in old age story that takes seriously the bodies, the histories, the diminishments, and the unexpected discoveries, as two old loners join in running, hiking, being sexual and writing about it all. The dormant volcano Mauna Kea, on whose high barrens and forested lower slopes much of the novel is set, offers a kind of scale for measuring human connection—and wrongdoing.