HEARTWOOD

An entrancing literary mystery about a hiker who is lost in the woods and the indomitable women who set out to find her.

A hiker is lost in the Maine woods. She is 42-year-old Valerie Gillis, a nurse who is taking a post-Covid sabbatical by hiking the legendary Appalachian Trail. She is almost to the northern terminus when she vanishes. Beverly Miller, the first female game warden ever hired in the state of Maine, has a near-perfect record of finding lost people. She sets out to find Valerie, leading a search and rescue mission through the impenetrable woods. Meanwhile, Lena, an elderly birdwatcher living in a retirement facility, signs on as internet sleuth, suspecting she might have the key to the case. At the center of this story are the poetic letters that Valerie writes to her mother as she awaits rescue, facing hunger and battling the elements. Her epic battle to stay alive requires her to find strength even when rescue seems impossible. Her story explores how being lost changes us, and how we psychologically survive it. With a flavor of grassroots feminist spirit, each of these three women is unforgettable and unshakeable. Heartwood is a poem to mothers, daughters, nurses, first responders, loners, and lovers of nature, and to anyone who's been lost along the way, as Amity Gaige fuses style with great storytelling, creating a novel of breathtaking dexterity. Amity Gaige is the author of O My Darling, The Folded World, Schroder, and Sea Wife. Sea Wife was a 2020 New York Times Notable Book and an Elle Best Book of 2020. Her previous novel, Schroder, was named one of Best Books of 2013 by The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, among others, and was shortlisted for The Folio Prize in the UK (2014). Sea Wife and Schroder have been translated into a combined 18 languages. Amity is the winner of a Fulbright Fellowship, fellowships at the MacDowell and Yaddo colonies, and a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. Her writing has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Harper's Bazaar, and elsewhere. She lives in Connecticut with her family and teaches creative writing at Yale.