Amity GaigeAuthor of Sea Wife

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.