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Pre-release: Expected April 1, 2025
0 of 10 copies available
Wait time: Not available
"A riveting wilderness suspense novel by a novelist at the height of her powers" (Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Candy House), Heartwood takes you on a gripping journey as a search and rescue team race against time when an experienced hiker mysteriously disappears on the Appalachian Trail in Maine.
In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping.
At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who leads the search on the ground. Meanwhile, Lena, a seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher in a Connecticut retirement community, becomes an unexpected armchair detective. Roving between these compelling narratives, a puzzle emerges, intensifying the frantic search, as Valerie's disappearance may not be accidental.
Heartwood is a "gem of a thousand facets—suspenseful, transporting, tender, and ultimately soul-mending," (Megan Majumdar, New York Times bestselling author of A Burning) that tells the story of a lost hiker's odyssey and is a moving rendering of each character's interior journey. The mystery inspires larger questions about the many ways in which we get lost, and how we are found. At its core, Heartwood is a redemptive novel, written with both enormous literary ambition and love.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
April 1, 2025 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781668063620
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781668063620
- File size: 4333 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from March 1, 2025
A 42-year-old hiker goes missing from the Appalachian Trail in Maine in Gaige's (Sea Wife, 2020) suspenseful, wrenching novel. In July 2022, Valerie has been hiking the trail, starting in Virginia, for three months. A nurse who was devastated by working during the pandemic, she frequently meets up with her husband, Gregory, who follows her by car and refreshes her supplies. When she doesn't show up at a planned meeting place, Gregory reports her missing, and the investigation is taken up by Bev, a thirty-year veteran of the Maine warden's service. Meanwhile, at a retirement community in Connecticut, 76-year-old loner Lena becomes determined to help solve the case. As the days tick on and Valerie's fate looks more dire, Gaige moves between Bev's increasingly desperate attempts at a rescue, Lena's surprising online discoveries, and letters Valerie writes to her mother from the clearing where she has set up her tent. A crackling adventure story, a meditation on the fraught human connection to nature, and a subtle examination of the rocky relationships between mothers and daughters that shape the lives of its three main characters, the novel tightens its grip as it moves toward uncovering its central mysteries.COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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