Don Mitchell’s novel 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.