A Northern Light

The Printz Honor–winning YA novel: "A contemporary classic" of a girl's coming-of-age and the real-life murder that rocked early twentieth-century America (New York Times–bestselling author Ruta Sepetys).

Growing up in the Adirondack Mountains, sixteen-year-old Mattie Gokey dreams of becoming a writer. Still grieving her mother's death, and pressured to marry a wealthy but dull local boy, she decides to flee her home and take a job at the elegant Glenmore Hotel.


Mattie is thrilled to enter a new world of wealth and sophistication. But she is caught off guard when a guest named Grace Brown asks her to burn a secret bundle of letters. And when Grace's drowned body is fished from Big Moose Lake, Mattie discovers that the letters could reveal the grim truth behind a murder.


Set against the murder that inspired Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, this Printz Honor-winning coming-of-age novel effortlessly weaves romance, history, and a murder mystery into a moving and wholly original.