‘Heartwood’ by Amity Gaige book review - The Washington Post

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Amity Gaige’s thriller was inspired by a real-life tragedy along the Appalachian Trail.

March 25, 2025

(Illustration by Josh Chen/The Washington Post; The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Five years after the pandemic shut down the world, covid is still proving to be a novel virus for American fiction. Of course, there are classic stories of isolation and grief, such as Michael Cunningham’s exquisite “Day.” In the work of other writers, covid has mutated in surprising ways. Last year, for instance, Regina Porter used the closures as the basis for her sharp social satire, “The Rich People Have Gone Away.”

And now, Amity Gaige follows the long shadow of the pandemic into the woods, where she finds an imperiled nurse named Valerie Gillis on the Appalachian Trail. “Heartwood,” Gaige’s fifth novel, is a thriller that could work without a recollection of the pandemic but draws its resonance from our shared memory of that ordeal.

“No one hikes two thousand miles because they’re happy,” Valerie says. “Everybody’s got a reason to hike the trail. ... What was mine? Well, I suppose it was to heal.”

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A born caregiver, Valerie “became a nurse to fix things.” But in a hospital under viral siege — “in an absolute vacuum of dignity” with twice as many patients as she was supposed to have and the alarm constantly blaring “CODE BLUE” — Valerie and her colleagues found themselves “crushed between empathy and impotence.”

To recover from that trial — that impossible choice between being a hero or falling apart — Valerie took a five-month leave of absence to walk the Appalachian Trail. She was doing it alone with the logistical support of her husband, Gregory. But along the way, Valerie realized she didn’t love Gregory anymore, and, ever the stickler for honesty, she told him. Soon after, somewhere in the wilds of Maine, in “a claustrophobic wall of foliage,” she vanished.

You think you know where this is headed. Trust me, you don’t.

Gaige was inspired — or haunted — by the real-life tragedy that befell Geraldine Largay. A retired Air Force nurse who went by the trail name Inchworm, Largay lost track of the Appalachian Trail somewhere in northwest Maine during the summer of 2013. A massive search ensued over several weeks. Tips poured in from hikers, friends and psychics, suggesting alternative paths, identity theft, murder and Bigfoot. Largay’s body was found two years later. Evidence indicated that she had survived almost a month before dying of exposure.

“Heartwood” takes only the broad outlines of that tragedy, shifts the time frame to after the pandemic closures and introduces a host of engaging characters. The chapters spin through a carousel of narrators, interviews, newspaper clippings and more — all presented in the present tense as the possibility of survival pours through the hourglass of probability. Maine, we’re told, includes the toughest section of the Appalachian Trail, but as hikers near the end, they grow careless and lose focus. “They tend to wander off, to break down physically or mentally,” Gaige writes.

We follow Valerie’s struggle in journal entries addressed to her mother. Once she leaves the trail — without a compass or a locator beacon — she becomes lost in terrain too rough even for search dogs. “Hunger undresses me,” she writes on the eighth day. “The only foraging I’ve ever done is finding the cleanest yam at the bin at Whole Foods.” As a nurse, she knows what’s happening to her body — and what awaits if she isn’t found soon.

Ironically, despite her position at the center of this crisis, Valerie’s poetic voice is not the novel’s most convincing. The sense of suspense and deterioration is thwarted by her literary artfulness, her languid reflections on the past and her self-conscious cliff-hangers. We expect the thoughts of a starving woman crashing through the dark woods desperately craving her anxiety medication, but instead we get the pearly phrases of a writing professor at Yale. I’d like to imagine that as my kidneys fail and my intestines begin to digest themselves, I might be composed enough to write, “Eventually, the milky-blue dawn light caused the birds of the Maine woods to chorus,” but I doubt it.

Far more convincing are the chapters narrated by Lieutenant Beverly Miller. Too tall, too single and too much from Massachusetts, Bev was the first female leader appointed to the Maine Warden Service. “You know the story,” Bev says. “The one who has the most to prove works harder, works until she bleeds, works all day and night, takes every call, dispenses with the weekend.”

With Bev, Gaige takes us into the mind of a devoted professional determined to keep the ever-expanding group of searchers focused even as kooks flood the tip line and the media grows increasingly critical. Despite her long record of success in search and rescue, Bev knows that some folks are still out to discount her qualifications for the job. Every morning, she must rouse her staff and encourage Valerie’s parents, all while trying not to be distracted by the news that her own mother is dying in hospice. It’s a clash of competing burdens that makes for a terrifically moving and tense thriller.

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But oddly, the real furnace of “Heartwood” is its most surprising and unpleasant character, a woman who seems at first to have nothing to do with the panicked search for Valerie. Lena Kucharski, 76, is an irritable, intellectual woman who uses an electric wheelchair because of neuropathy. “Perhaps Lena is meant to be dead already,” Gaige writes in a voice that matches the woman’s bitter wit. “She is still alive due to some clerical oversight. She lingers in a fading body, one that is being erased unevenly. She still has her bowels, her grievances, and her obsessions. But she no longer has her legs, nor any fellow feeling, no patience.”

The retirement home where she lives is fine, except that it’s mostly filled with sweet people she has no interest in. No matter. She has her books, and, since the pandemic, she’s kept up a lively correspondence with /u/TerribleSilence, whom she found on a subreddit about foraging. Everything about this relationship is odd, unsettling and bracingly real. Lena and her unstable online friend bond over their interest in rare ferns and mushrooms, but soon they turn their foraging skills to the case of the woman lost in the Maine woods hundreds of miles away. Their quixotic pursuit flickers between madness and menace. Could the lost woman be Lena’s estranged daughter? Could TerribleSilence be on the cusp of uncovering a vast government conspiracy?

No and no — so why are these two even in this novel?

That’s not initially clear, but honestly it’s a genius move, devoid of the typical camp or sentimentality of retirement-home fiction. We see in the story of Lena and TerribleSilence the way news of a missing person excites the imagination of strangers, inspiring their sympathy, of course, but also a vast range of private terrors and private hopes.

What’s more, throughout this peculiar thriller, Gaige explores the complicated and ever-evolving bonds that tether family members. In the hopeful entries that Valerie writes in her soggy journal, in the distracting thoughts of hospice that Bev tries to push from her mind and in the rising panic Lena feels in her retirement home, we see the unbreakable bonds between mothers and daughters, lost and found.

Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post. He is the book critic for “CBS Sunday Morning.”

Heartwood

By Amity Gaige.

Simon & Schuster. 309 pp. $28.99