Amity Gaige
Amity Gaige’s novel, Heartwood, tells the story of Valerie Gillis, a nurse who goes missing while hiking through the remote woods of Maine on the Appalachian Trail. As a search and rescue team, led by Maine’s only female State Game Warden, Beverly Miller, races against time and possibly a clandestine paramilitary group to find her, a separate investigation is launched by seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher Lena who lives in a Connecticut retirement community. Through the lenses of Beverly and Lena and Valerie’s own journal entries, readers explore the many ways in which we may be lost and found. Heartwood is Amity Gaige’s fifth novel. A national bestseller, it was selected as a Read with Jenna Pick for April 2025. In 2018, Gaige was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. She lives in Connecticut with her family and teaches creative writing at Yale.
“A terrifically moving and tense thriller…genius.” — The Washington Post.
“As gratifying as a daffodil at the end of a long winter.” — The New York Times.
At the Festival
Amity Gaige appears in 2 sessions in the archive.
2026 Festival: Video and Photos
Featuring Amity Gaige, Karen Russell, Alice Austen, Virginia Evans, Susanna Kwan, Daria Lavelle, Kyra Davis Lurie, Leila Mottley and Kathy Wang
Books
Copies of every title are available from Vroman's Bookstore at the festival.
Heartwood
Amity Gaige’s novel, Heartwood, tells the story of Valerie Gillis, a nurse who goes missing while hiking through the remote woods of Maine on the Appalachian Trail. As a search and rescue team, led by Maine’s only female State Game Warden, Beverly Miller, races against time and possibly a clandestine paramilitary group to find her, a separate investigation is launched by seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher Lena who lives in a Connecticut retirement community. Through the lenses of Beverly and Lena and Valerie’s own journal entries, readers explore the many ways in which we may be lost and found. Heartwood is Amity Gaige’s fifth novel. A national bestseller, it was selected as a Read with Jenna Pick for April 2025. In 2018, Gaige was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction.
Sea Wife
In Amity Gaige’s Sea Wife, a husband, his reluctant wife and their small children embark on a year-long sea voyage in a boat they barely know how to sail. Trouble follows in a twist that will both thrill and confound the reader. A sophisticated page-turner, Sea Wife explores marital discord, parenthood, literary ambition, and politics. Sea Wife is told from the side-by-side perspective of both husband and wife, providing a riveting account of the same event.
Sea Wife was named a New York Times Notable Book.
The author of three other novels, O My Darling, The Folded World, and Schroder, Gaige was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, fellowships at the MacDowell and Yaddo colonies, and a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction. Gaige earned her BA from Brown and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The longtime Visiting Writer at Amherst College, she now teaches creative writing at Yale.
“Stunning…Amity [tows] you to tragedy with the graceful crawl of a poet and the motorboat intensity of a suspense author.”— New York Times Book Review
“Profound and universal…Sea Wife achieves a lovely balance between the real and the metaphoric.”— The Wall Street Journal