Book Description

Written in a style of Per Peterson meets John Banville and Jesmyn Ward, Move Over Mountain is a poetic and starkly moving novel for readers who contemplate life's difficult questions and fear their simplest answers. In the span of one winter, John Underwood, a quiet and distant sixty-eight-year old man is suddenly forced to reckon with the present moment when his wife Sylvia is rendered unconscious, hospitalized, and left lingering somewhere between life and death. Plagued by epilepsy, John fears that, as his seizures continue, he will eventually lose all memory of his wife if she dies. Day after day, he sits at her bedside, clinging desperately onto all of the precious moments of quiet, ordinary life, hoping to make sense of what brought him to this painful moment. As winter approaches and John refuses to let Sylvia go, he is tormented by his own gnawing conscience, urging him to reach out to his estranged daughter, Valerie. As the dark battle against his fearful heart rages on, a glimmer of hope emerges when John meets his grandson for the first time. Set against the backdrop of the rural North Carolina mountains, Move Over Mountain tells the story of one man's fall into the grips of self-made fear and isolation, and his journey to find redemption.