Died on the Mountain Part 2

Filling the silence behind Outside Looking In, this is the story of the man before the van, the report, and the death that may not have been what it seemed.

A soldier can survive a war and still lose everything at home.

After Belfast, South Armagh, Bosnia and Iraq, Paul returns with a commendation, a family, and the belief that being useful might be enough to hold a life together. It isn’t.

When his marriage collapses and his children vanish behind years of silence, he runs for the mountains. Snowboarding becomes his battlefield. Chamonix becomes his garden. Danger, drugs, women, work, vans, transfer roads, and high Alpine winters become the life he builds around the wound he cannot close.

Adapted from the journal Life Without a Toaster, Died on the Mountain, Buried in the Street is a raw semi-fiction novel about war, fatherhood, exile, reinvention, and the stories men tell themselves in order to keep moving.

But when the last thread to his old life finally breaks, Paul stops waiting to be found.

If being alive was not enough to make his daughters read the truth, perhaps dying would be.

A soldier.

A father.

A van.

A life that refused to stay buried.