The story opens with a shocking scene: a young man, driving late at night on a deserted road, has a moment’s lack of concentration; a girl suddenly appears and, before he can brake, he knocks her down. He stops briefly but, seeing her unmoving form in the ditch, he panics and drives on. As the story unfolds, switching between past and present, and at a leisurely but gripping pace, the reader discovers the events which preceded and succeeded this accident. The young man is twenty two year old Curtis, whose father, Tom, is a forestry worker.
Soon after Tom finished high school his girlfriend, Elka, became pregnant and he had to put his plans and dreams on hold when he married her. He was just nineteen years old. He soon discovered that she was a deeply troubled young woman who found it difficult to adjust to motherhood. The quality of her parenting was erratic, she left home on several occasions and Tom often feared for Curtis’s safety. When she left for the final time Curtis was five, his sister Erin was just three months old and Tom was thrust into single-parenthood. Essentially a decent, if rather taciturn man, he always strove to do the right thing – for his children, his employees and even for the animals he liked to hunt –all creatures deserved a “clean” kill and, if he just wounded them, he saw it as his duty to track them down and finish what he had started. From the glimpses we get of some very tender moments with his children, although he “wasn’t in the habit of holding his children”, it is clear that he isn’t an emotionless man. However, he is emotionally illiterate – “I’ve never been any good at giving people what they need” – and, for the most part, demonstrates his caring by fixing things; by looking for practical solutions to problems. He had made sacrifices to bring up his children but now, with Curtis having left home a few years earlier, and Erin soon to be going to university, he could now plan to fulfil his own dream of buying a plot of land in the forest he loved, building a cabin and living as he wanted to. However, when he is working deep in the forest, with his team of planters, the police come looking for Curtis and he swiftly recognises that parenthood has no cut-off point, that he needs to leave the forest, to track his son down before the police do, and to find a way to guide him through this crisis. He acknowledges to himself that he has so often failed his son, and that the last time he saw him he had failed to listen when Curtis tried to tell him about the accident; he must not fail him again.
I found this a powerful, sad and haunting story which, once I had started it, I had difficulty putting down – and then, as soon as I had finished it, I wanted to immediately read it again. As the story moved between past and present, I enjoyed the gradual exploration of the changing relationship between father and son, and the reasons behind the difficulties they had in communicating their needs and feelings. In childhood Curtis had always been more of a dreamer than his tomboyish sister. Both children had been taught, from an early age, how to handle a gun but whilst Erin enjoyed the hunting trips with their father and was a good shot, Curtis didn’t, and wasn’t; he felt that he was a disappointment to his father. Although Erin appeared to be on the periphery of the developing story, she came across as something of a lynchpin for both Tom and Curtis, and linked their stories. In fact, the
various women in the story – Erin, Tom’s mother (another lynchpin), his estranged mother in law, who still lives an alternative life-style on a small, remote island, Tom’s girlfriend, the woman he has an affair with in the forestry camp and even Curtis’s girlfriend – all appear, in different ways, to exert a powerful influence on the men in the story, and on its progress. I found all the characters credible and memorable, and found myself caring deeply about what happened to them – even when I felt frustrated with them!
Ideas surrounding personal freedom versus responsibility, negotiating the choices people are faced with throughout life, making sacrifices, fulfilling dreams, were all major, recurring themes throughout the unfolding narrative. I thought that the author captured the psychological dynamics of these struggles in a convincing way, and that she handled the ending of the story in a credible way. I really enjoyed her spare prose – at times lyrical, at other times sharp and edgy – and thought that it really conveyed a powerful sense of people in crisis as well as of time and place. Her descriptions of the forest, of the back-breaking work of re-afforestation, of the mountains and the island were so atmospheric that I could almost smell the earth, see the panoramic views, experience the mist descending – and feel the mosquitoes and black-fly bite!
This truly is a remarkable debut novel, reminiscent for me of Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, and I hope it won’t be too long before we are treated to another one from this talented author. ( )

The Mountain Can Wait is a very well written book; the imagery is amazing and really brings the story to life. Tom is such a flawed and realistic character— I couldn’t help but like him. I must say that I was a little surprised when I started reading and realized it wasn’t a thriller. I thought the story would be less focused on the father/son relationship and more on the hit and run accident. Overall, it’s worth the read and will leave you thinking about relationships in your life long after the book is over.

--Received an ARC in exchange for a review ( )