IF A STORY IS A PATH AND A TELLER THE GUIDE, a good storyteller decorates the path with details that keep readers walking, always eager to peer around the corner, to discover what lies ahead. In his novel, The Mountain Clinic, Harold Hoefle demonstrates the power of detail with a touching tale of a young man’s circuitous search for answers about his curious family.

The novel opens in 1966 when Walter Schwende is seven years old. Born to Austrian parents living in Scarborough, Walter’s youthful suburban security is shattered when his father, Franz, disappears, presumed dead. Walter is devastated, but, refreshingly, Hoefle doesn’t overwhelm with syrupy father-figure reverence. Prior to the disappearance, Walter’s opinion of his father is multifaceted: he’s somebody to respect, to love, to please, to fear. This mixture of feelings doesn’t make the sudden loss any less distressing, however, and a lack of hard evidence – namely, Franz’s body– prevents Walter from experiencing closure.

Walter’s mother, though, swiftly accepts that her husband is dead — too swiftly for Walter’s taste. He formulates hopeful theories to the contrary that she refuses to listen to. In the ensuing years, Walter grows increasingly frustrated with his mother’s long absences and, when home, her distance and preoccupation with groceries and meals. “She stopped crying, wiped some crumbs from my lips and ate them.” As it’s too painful to stay, Walter turns to travel in his mid-twenties. His journeying takes him to Vancouver, to a northern mining town, Nicaragua, Montreal, and finally for a visit to his father’s native Austria.

Each of Walter’s moves represents a chapter in The Mountain Clinic, and each is, arguably, a story on its own. Throughout, it is Hoefle’s attention to honest details that brings Walter’s story to life.

In an early scene, Walter recalls visiting a park with his father. Hoefle uses a paragraph to describe the sounds in the park, its structures, the “whooshing plummet” of sliding down a slide. By the paragraph’s sixth sentence, Walter and Franz are leaving, hand in hand, and yet, for all its physical brevity, the scene feels abundant. The paragraph’s seventh and final sentence reads, simply, “The sky had purple in it.” Banal on its own, but in the context of memory, this small yet crucial detail is the gas in the time machine’s tank, securing arrival at a specific place and time. This infusion of authenticity produces a measure of blurring between fiction and truth, and readers may be excused for forgetting at times that the book is a novel and not a memoir. What matters is Hoefle’s ability to consistently illuminate the most important thing: the story.

There is little pretense to this book, no gratuitous symbolism, no oppressive metaphors. The Mountain Clinic reads like a telling, with a likable voice that warrants listening to. This affability is smartly offset by thorny subjects like mental illness and family dysfunction, and nasty environments like the war-torn Nicaragua of the 1980s, and a mine with an antagonized workforce. Writers typically do well not to allow the truth to get in the way of a good story. To the benefit of The Mountain Clinic, Harold Hoefle puts a different spin on this maxim by not allowing the overly contrived to muddle good fiction.

Mark Paterson is the author of the short story collections

A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine and Other People’s Showers.