Amity Gaige’s Heartwood is the latest pick for Jenna Bush Hager’s Today show book club.
Gaige’s novel, scheduled for publication next Tuesday by Simon & Schuster, follows Valerie Gillis, a hiker who goes missing in the Maine woods, and Beverly Miller, the game warden who leads the search for her. A critic for Kirkus called the book “a winning portrait of a woman, and community, in peril.”
Hager announced the book’s selection on the Today show, saying, “I picked up this propulsive mystery, and from the very first page, I was hooked.…This is a story of survival, hope, and the way we find our ways back to each other and to ourselves.”
Gaige, herself a hiker, told Today.com, “We all get emotionally lost and psychologically lost on a daily or yearly basis. I felt that I quickly accessed my knowledge of emotional lostness and gave it to my hiker and was able to imagine and research the rest in terms of what she might do.”
She said that she believes readers can relate to the feeling of being lost.
“Have you ever been physically lost?” she said. “How did it feel? Why is it so scary? When have you been emotionally or spiritually lost, and also, who rescued you? There’s always somebody. Even in the darkest times, there’s somebody who sees you, who steps in.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
