This “coming-of-age” novel weaves together stories of love and hiking in a narrative spanning three distinct love triangle relationships across three generations. On the labyrinthian path to finding each another, the protagonists come face to face with their own self-doubts and bygone traumas.

When Fu Yu-Shan and Lin Hsuan-Yung’s childhood friendship blossoms into reciprocal love in adolescence, their parents step in, forbidding either from seeing each other again. Despite furtive contacts through a friend’s text message account, the two gradually fall out of touch, their love for one another lost in the passage of time.

Years later, a now older Yu-Shan strikes up a friendship with Joe, a dashingly handsome colleague, while organizing a hike for their company. She soon learns that Joe not only knows of her past with Hsuan-Yung but that it was his account they had used to keep in touch early on. With Joe’s help, they reconnect, begin hiking together and, well removed from their parents’ shadow, pick up where they’d left off on their romantic journey. But Yu-Shan also harbors feelings for Joe, especially after learning of his own emotional struggles with trauma.

Yu-Shan keeps news of her rekindled romance from her parents because of the complicated relationship they share with Hsuan-Yung’s mother, who is both as close as a sister to her own mother and her father’s lover. Hsuan-Yung, honoring a promise to an old hunter friend, leaves to trek in Nepal. Yu-Shan learns from the old hunter that Hsuan-Yung’s trek is tied to the misfortunes encountered in Tibet several decades ago by a young woman … a story with which Yu-Shan too is connected.

The author imbues the narrative with insights gleaned during contemplative hikes and weaves rich metaphor and imagery into her characters’ inner dialogues. The undulating mountain landscapes described throughout mirror the emotional twists and turns in the plotline, guiding the reader on a trek in which high mountain mist, morning dew, and alpine flora and fauna all take on deeper meanings in the narrative. Read with your heart and discover the truth in what the mountains have to say.