The publisher’s note in the advance copy of "The Possibilities," the new novel by Hawaii author Kaui Hart Hemmings, entices reviewers with the promise of a familiar motif: trouble in paradise.

As in her first novel-turned-Oscar-winning-film, "The Descendants," themes of love and heartache play against life in a tourist setting. Hemmings replaced Hawaii, though, with the ski resort town of Breckenridge, Colo. And her new protagonist is a single mother mourning the death of her son, not a wealthy landowner confronting the infidelity of his dying, comatose wife.

Although grief and death are catalysts for personal discovery in both novels, Hemmings insists the stories are different.

"This book is about the politics and mannerisms that go along with grief and the absurd things that come along with a death," said Hemmings, who lives in Mau­na­wili with her husband, attorney Andy Lau­ten­bach, and their two young children.

"I think death brings out the best and worst in people, and it’s compelling for fiction," said the 38-year-old Hemmings. "That’s all life is about anyway — life or death — so which one am I going to write about? I am going to write about both."

"The Possibilities" will be published next month by Simon & Schuster, and it’s a long-awaited second novel. Seven years have passed since the publication of "The Descendants," a story that showcased Hemmings’ spare, unsentimental voice.

"The Possibilities" follows Sarah St. John, whose 22-year-old son, Cully, was killed in an avalanche just a few months before the book’s opening scene. St. John, who was born and raised in Breckenridge, works as an on-air co-host at a local TV station. She lives with her father, Lyle, a retiree who moved into her basement.

Each day delivers a mix of feelings as well as questions about how St. John should respond.

Sometimes it’s OK to smile. Sometimes a smile prompts an avalanche of guilt.

Hemmings said she loved creating St. John, a character who she called crass, funny, sarcastic and sad.

"People ask me sometimes how do I balance that mixture of sadness and humor," Hemmings said. "It’s because I am trying to write what life is like. I don’t think I’ve been able to get through a day when something funny and absurd and incongruous happens, and I think that life gets interrupted by humor, by sadness, by annoyances."

Hemmings also enjoyed writing about Lyle and his relationship with a young woman named Kit who drops unexpectedly into their lives. The dialogue Hemmings created for Lyle, once a powerful man in the Breckenridge resort industry, was special, she said.

"He has to be a father and at the same time a sad griever," Hemmings said. "And he almost has to go it alone because you can’t show your children how much you need them. And he was just funny."

Hemmings was working on a version of "The Possibilities" when she decided to stop and instead write "The Descendants," which was published in 2007. A whirlwind of success followed: The book became a hit movie in 2011 and earned an adapted-screenplay Oscar for its director, Alexander Payne, and a Golden Globe award for its star, George Clooney.

Her new novel, which won’t be on shelves until May 13, could go that route as well. It’s part of a deal that has Hollywood writer-director Jason Reitman ("Juno," "Up in the Air") working on a film adaptation.

After the success of "The Descendants," Hemmings resumed work on "The Possibilities" but changed the plot, she said. What did not change was the setting.

Hemmings lived in Colo­rado for about seven years. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Colo­rado College in Colo­rado Springs. She lived for a time in Breckenridge, where she met her husband. (Hemmings also received a Master of Fine Arts in writing from Sarah Law­rence College in New York and studied creative writing as a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University.)

She wanted to go beyond the polished facade the tourists saw — a theme she also explored in "The Descendants" — and to understand the lives of the people who lived there.

"It was a place that stuck with me," Hemmings said. "And place always comes first with me and my writing, and then I just want to go deeper."

As she created St. John, the author was not consciously trying to tap into the character’s pain. More than anything, Hemmings sought the realism of St. John’s situation — not just her emotions, but a compelling narrative that reflected her life.

She wanted to see what St. John had to say. To do that required a cold detachment, she said.

"When I write, I am not feeling a bunch of things," Hemmings said. "I am not lyrical. I am not poetic. I don’t wait for the clouds to part and inspiration to come."

Instead, as she focused on a scene, Hemmings asked herself what St. John would do. But that’s where the rub is, where the real world chafes with "a Hollywood version of grief," Hemmings said. People don’t grieve every waking moment.

"I think sometimes it comes off as irreverent or unlikeable at times, the way we grieve or respond and move through the day," she said. "But I am portraying a woman and how she behaved without thinking that anyone is watching. So when I’m writing, I just try to keep it real."

From "The Possibilities," by Kaui Hart Hemmings. Copyright 2014 by Kaui Hart Hemmings. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER 1

I pretend that I’m not from here. I’m a woman from Idaho, on vacation with friends. I’m a newlywed from Indiana. An unremarkable guest at the Village Hotel, exploring Breckenridge, Colorado, waiting for a valet to bring her rented car around. A drop of water falls on my head. I look up at the green awning and move so that I’m fully covered. A black Escalade blasting music enters the roundabout. The car is huge, and I expect someone huge to go with it, but out come three young boys — the driver, short, passengers, tall — and the valet, also a young boy, wordlessly takes the driver’s keys, hands him a ticket, and nods his head.

My son, Cully, who used to work here as a valet just three months ago, told me that he hated to park cars for people his age, and I can see why. Growing up I’d feel the same thing, an embarrassment to work in front of friends and peers. The worst job I had was fitting ski boots for girls who came here on spring break from places like Florida and Texas. They were always saying, "It hurts," and I would say that it’s supposed to, making the boots tighter.

I was also a waitress at Briar Rose, where kids from school came in with their parents and they’d place their orders and I’d take their orders as if we didn’t know each other. I remember Leslie Day sucking the antler of her lobster and thought, Only rich people could get away with that, or even know to do that in the first place. We weren’t poor by any means, but compared to a lot of newcomers whose fathers came to town to retire at forty, it sometimes seemed that way.

The valet uniforms are black slacks and a black fleece, something Cully was embarrassed to wear. Some of them wear black change purses around their waists. Cully would rather lose money. I envision him running and opening car doors, taking tips, not looking at the amount until they were gone. You pretend not to care.

I look at these boys all around the same age as my son, these boys with mothers and fathers, hopes and problems, and an embarrassing urge comes over me to hold them. To swoop them up in my arms, something Cully as a child always wanted me to do and I’d often get annoyed. You’re a big boy. You can walk. At times he was such jarring cargo, especially when he was first born and I was only twenty-one. He felt like a school project, the egg I was supposed to carry around and not ever leave or break.

I should go. I have ten more minutes before I need to get to work. While I’ve been in this week doing preinterviews, today will be my first day back on camera after a three-month absence. I don’t move. I look at one of the valets — the tall one with black hair, smooth like a helmet; I look at him like he’s a kind of god. Please, give me strength. Strength to return, to get back to life. My plan is to move in seamlessly, drawing as little attention to myself as possible. I will reemerge wearing a figurative cap, similar to the one my twenty-two-year-old son wore, what the kids wear — a cap to hide their eyes, their face, a cap that says I’m here but I’m not here.

Cully is dead. He died. That’s why I left work. Good reason, though I don’t really have a good one for coming back, for emerging from hibernation. I guess I feel that I’ve reached that unspoken, societal deadline that suggests you reach for your bootstraps and pull. I feel like it’s time to start working on getting somewhere else, some other periphery or vantage point. I don’t need to move up, but maybe sideways.