The Mountain Story
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THE MOUNTAIN STORY a novel by Lori Lansens 94,000 words/ Edited manuscript now available A HIGHLY DRAMATIC ADVENTURE STORY AND A REVEALING EXAMINATION OF FAMILY DYNAMICS The Mountain Story is a whopping great adventure tale, but it is much more than that. It is an epic family drama in the mould of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, which served as Lori’s inspiration. The novel is set on a mountain outside Palm Springs. Travelling up on the cable car from city to mountainside is akin to moving from the climate of Mexico to the climate of Alaska in about fifteen minutes. The mountain is easy to get lost on — Lori has done it. You can always see the desert city below, but you cannot find your way down to it. The Mountain Story is told by Wolf Truly, who on his eighteenth birthday got lost with three women for five days in the mountain wilderness just outside Palm Springs. Now an adult and a father, Wolf is writing this account of what really happened on the mountain for his son Danny, who has just started college. Wolf realizes that he owes his son the truth, for reasons that become clear in a shocking revelation at the end of the novel. Tense and gripping, The Mountain Story includes sex, death, deep Photo: Laura Starks emotion, and sacrifice. Praise for the work of Lori Lansens “The Girls, by Lori Lansens, is a ballad, a melancholy song of two very strange, enchanted girls who live out their peculiar, ordinary lives is a rural corner of Canada….The Girls glides by like a watercolor dream, finding its poetry in dailiness and the universalities of human desire and connection…. Lansens, who has a gentle, open way of writing, makes of these two girls a kind of perfect marriage, harmonious and everlasting.” — THE NEW YORK TIMES “Like short-story queen Alice Munro, to whom she is often compared, Lansens demonstrates a singular gift for discerning both the ordinary and the extraordinary in small-town life and small-town people.” — THE WINNIPEG FREE PRESS “Rush Home Road, the story of a 70-year-old woman’s journey through the nearly unbearable sorrows of her past, in order to save an abandoned little girl, is a first novel of exquisite power, honesty, and conviction. Its portrait of how much has changed, and how little, over nearly a century, in the realms of race, love, hate, and loss, is quite nearly without flaws.” — JACQUELYN MITCHARD, author of The Deep End of the Ocean “Lansens’s great capacity for humour and insight… makes The Wife’s Tale riveting and compelling.” — ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY LORI LANSENS was a successful screenwriter before she burst onto the RIGHTS SOLD literary scene in 2002 with her first novel Rush Home Road. Published in US: Gallery/Simon & Schuster, eleven countries, Rush Home Road received rave reviews around the world. April 2015 UK: Simon and Schuster, April 2015 Her follow-up novel The Girls was an international success as well. Rights were Canada: Knopf, spring 2015 sold in 13 territories and it featured as a book club pick by Richard & Judy in the Norway: Juritzen Forlag UK, selling 300,000 copies. Her third novel The Wife’s Tale is in development Israel: Keter as a film. Born and raised in Chatham, Ontario, Lori Lansens now makes her home in Los Angeles with her husband and two children. THE MOUNTAIN STORY AN EXCERPT Dear Daniel, A person has to have lived a little to appreciate a survival story. Isn’t that what I’ve always said? I promised that when I thought you were old enough to hear it, I’d tell you mine. It’s no tale for a child, but you’re hardly a child anymore. Still, it’s hard to know when a son’s ready for the truth about his old man. You’re older now than I was when I got lost with three strangers in the mountain wilderness. Five days in the freezing cold without adequate food or water or shelter. You know that part, and you know that not everyone survived. What happened up there changed my life. The story will change yours. The night of your middle school graduation was the first time I almost told you what really happened; then it was your fourteenth birthday, and fifteenth, and every birthday after. You begged to hear it, and you deserved to be told, but it was never that simple, Danny. To understand about the mountain, you have to know what came before. Remember last spring when we were visiting colleges? We were on that dark gravel road just outside of Bloomington and I nearly hit the deer. I was so shaken I had to pull off at a truck stop. You tried to comfort me, pointing out that the deer wasn’t injured, and even if there had been a collision it wouldn’t have been my fault. I was going to tell you then. I had the perfect opening. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was the one who wasn’t ready to face the truth, and I realized I was never going to be ready to tell you how I managed to survive — not face to face. I’d edit, censor, lie, anything to avoid seeing your pain. But there’s no point in telling half a story, is there? Or worse, one that’s mostly fiction. So I wrote it down. I typed the whole thing out as it came to my fingers because that felt like the most honest thing to do. As for the timing? With you starting at Indiana State? When you get older you’ll see that there isn’t so much a good time or bad time for things, appearances to the contrary. There is just a time. The day I got lost with those three women — that fateful November day — was my first trip up the mountain in exactly one year. I’ll confess to you, that on that cool, grey afternoon of my eighteenth birthday, I was going to hike to a spot called Angel’s Peak to jump to my death. No one else knows that part of the story. When you were a little boy you’d study me in quiet moments and ask if I was thinking about the mountain. I almost always was. You asked if I ever dreamed about it. I did. Still do — especially now. Sometimes I wake up in a panic. Sometimes I wake missing old friends. My fellow hikers have been with me, in one way or another, since we were lost together all those years ago, walking alongside me when I’m out with the dogs, quiet when I’m reading in bed, guiding me with whispers when I can’t find my way. This is their story too. I’ve felt them looking over my shoulder, insisting on full disclosure. I’ve been grateful for the haunting. Your mother? She’s always said she didn’t need to know all the gory details. She’s been just fine in the dark. Still, we both knew this day would come, and once you’re finished reading, she’ll have to read it too. I’m afraid I’ve caged the truth for so long it’ll die in the wild. Your mother wishes it already had. Here it is, with love from a father to his son — the mountain story. Dad THE BUKOWSKI AGENCY LTD. 14 Prince Arthur Avenue, Suite 202 Toronto, Ontario M5R 1A9 Tel: (416) 928-6728 Fax: (416) 963-9978 e-mail: [email protected] www.bukowskiagency.com THE BEAR a novel by Claire Cameron 65,000 words / Finished books now available s Longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction s #1 bestseller in Canada IN A NAIL-BITER OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SUSPENSE TOLD BY A FIVE-YEAR-OLD IN A VOICE REMINISCENT OF ROOM, TWO SMALL CHILDREN ARE LEFT ALONE AT A REMOTE ISLAND CAMPGROUND WHEN THEIR PARENTS ARE ATTACKED BY A BEAR Algonquin Park consists of nearly three thousand square miles of wilderness situated 250 miles northeast of Toronto. It is a popular destination for campers, hikers, and canoeists. When in 1991 a couple who went on a camping trip there failed to return, friends contacted the police. Their partially eaten remains were found, with a large male black bear standing guard over them. There is no clear reason for what happened. Attacks by healthy black bears are extremely rare. Claire Cameron has imagined what might have transpired if the couple had brought small children with them. The Bear grabs you by the throat and will not let you go. Written by an author who has much experience of both wilderness survival and motherhood, it is a brilliant examination of how children help each other and themselves in such Photo: Roberto Caruso circumstances — a sort of rebuttal to Lord of the Flies. Praise for Claire Cameron’s The Bear “A gripping survival thriller… [an] agonizing odyssey of loss and being lost also has humour. The book’s anguished yet hopeful ending provides a touching terminus for Anna and Stick’s journey to adulthood. This expertly crafted novel could do for camping what Jaws did for swimming.” — PEOPLE, four-star review “It was even more haunting the second time around.” — THE INDEPENDENT, UK “Stylistically impressive and deeply moving.” — GLAMOUR MAGAZINE, UK “The Bear is a taut and touching story of how a child’s love and denial become survival skills. Claire Cameron takes a fairytale situation of children pitted against the wilderness, removes the fairies, and adds a terrifying and ravenous bear.