Heartwood
Valerie Gillis, a 42-year-old nurse hiking the Appalachian Trail solo to recover from a year of pandemic ICU work, disappears two hundred miles from the end of the trail in Maine. The book moves between her diary entries, written to her mother as her food runs out and she fights infection from a fall, Beverly Miller, the Maine State Game Warden running point on the search, Lena, a 76-year-old bird-watching widow in a Connecticut retirement community who turns armchair detective from her tablet, and the missing woman's mother. Amity Gaige builds the Maine woods into a fifth character and lets the four voices triangulate the search.
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A 42-year-old nurse vanishes from the Appalachian Trail in Maine, and a four-voice search unfolds across diary, warden, bird-watcher, and mother in this 2025 bestseller.
Heartwood was written by Amity Gaige and published in 2025. It is her fifth novel after Schroder, We Are Inevitable, and others. She also writes literary fiction with strong narrative tension.
Heartwood is fictional but informed by real Appalachian Trail thru-hiking, search-and-rescue operations, and the documented disappearances of long-distance hikers. Amity Gaige researched the trail community extensively.
Heartwood is 320 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Heartwood takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Heartwood is a standalone novel by Amity Gaige, not part of a series.
Heartwood is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.