Mauka—Hawaiian for “to the mountain”—explores what happens when two old friends—June Nakashima and Max Nelson—separated by sixty years and thousands of miles, reconnect in Hilo, Hawai'i. It’s a love story about old age that takes it seriously—the bodies, the histories, the diminishments, the unexpected discoveries—as two old loners enjoy running, hiking, being sexual and writing about it all—including their narrow escapes from death in the great 1960 Hilo tsunami. It is 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 without being dismissed.

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. Don Mitchell’s fine work 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. It’s also just a compulsive read. I have been to the islands many times, and this book is one of them. Do yourself a favor and grab a copy now. Or even sooner."

Sean Beaudoin, author of Welcome Thieves