Heartwood (A Read with Jenna Pick)
A Novel
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- USD 14.99
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- USD 14.99
Descripción editorial
“The best thriller of 2025.” —The Boston Globe * “Genius.” —The Washington Post
“A literary thriller of the highest order” (Elin Hilderbrand, New York Times bestselling author of The Perfect Couple), Heartwood takes you on a gripping journey as a search and rescue team race against time after a woman mysteriously disappears on the Appalachian Trail.
Deep in the Maine woods, an experienced 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,” (Megha 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 an “unputdownable” (Real Simple) and redemptive novel, written with both enormous literary ambition and love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A woman vanishes near Maine's 100-Mile Wilderness in this uneven literary thriller from Gaige (Sea Wife). At first, Gregory Bouras doesn't worry when his wife, Valerie, fails to meet him at a Maine trailhead for a scheduled resupply during her hike of the Appalachian Trail; she's been walking for three months now and has been routinely waylaid. After 24 hours without word, however, Gregory calls the authorities. Lt. Beverly Miller of the Maine Warden Service has led several dozen successful searches for off-course thru-hikers every year, but when a massive, multiday effort turns up no sign of Valerie, Bev fears the worst. Meanwhile, in a Connecticut retirement community, disabled septuagenarian Lena Kucharski learns of the search from a Mainer she met on a foraging subreddit who believes Valerie stumbled upon a secret military training facility. Gaige interweaves Bev's first-person narration with chapters from Lena's perspective, letters a lost Valerie writes to her mom, and transcripts of hotline tips and recorded interviews with people following the case. The preposterous, unfocused plot disappoints, but multifaceted characters and poetic prose enhance Gaige's tender meditations on aging and mother-daughter relationships. It's a mixed bag.