Amity Gaige
Acclaimed novelist, Yaddo artist, and author of the national bestseller Heartwood
Amity Gaige is the award-winning author of five novels, O My Darling, The Folded World, Schroder, Sea Wife and her most recent book Heartwood, an Instant National Best Seller. It was selected by Jenna Bush Hager of “The Today Show” as her April Read With Jenna Book Club pick.
“Heartwood is a riveting wilderness suspense novel: a missing person quest rendered in agile, extraordinary prose by a novelist at the height of her powers. I found it nearly impossible to put down.”
— Jennifer Egan, author of The Candy House
In 2018, Gaige was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction.Gaige lives in West Hartford, Connecticut, with her family and teaches creative writing at Yale.
Heartwood
By Amity Gaige
ISBN: 1668063603
Simon & Schuster (April 1, 2025)
Author photo credit: Jane Shauck
Books
About Heartwood
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.