“Heartwood” is a taut, resonant thriller about a woman who vanishes on the Appalachian Trail, 200 miles from her final destination. Amity Gaige weaves a suspenseful narrative through the voices of three women, each reckoning with journey of her own.
Valerie, an experienced 42-year-old hiker, writes poetic journal entries to her mother as she struggles to survive the wilderness. Beverly, a pioneering Maine State game warden, leads the search while fighting to keep hope alive. And, Lena, a withdrawn former scientist in a Connecticut retirement community, becomes increasingly — and mysteriously — drawn into the case.
Set against the rugged beauty of the Maine woods, “Heartwood” explores the rewards and dangers of being alone in nature. But the urgent rescue mission yields a deeper story about the emotional terrain each woman must navigate: the burdens they carry, the bonds they yearn to mend, and the resilience needed to forge their own paths forward.
The randomness of the beginning of “Gliff” makes it challenging to get into, though if you stick with it, four-time Man Booker finalist Ali Smith achieves what she sets out to do: tell a story about a totalitarian society with flashes of a possible future.
Two siblings, Briar and Rose, are taken away for their safety to an anonymous empty home. Gradually through conversations we understand their circumstances. They live in a “Brave New World” where people are defined and confined by borders marked by red lines literally painted around them and are labeled “unverifiables” for any number of offenses, like speaking the truth.
As they search for their parents, the sisters need to evade the technology and systems the government has in place to control the behaviors of the population. When the girls come across a horse in a field waiting for slaughter, it becomes a symbol of the domination of the individual versus resistance and freedom. Can they save the horse, and in doing so, save themselves?
Known for her innovative contemporary fiction, Smith’s prose is infused with interesting word play. The title of this first installment, “Gliff,” foreshadows a future novel entitled “Glyph” (same sound, different meaning). It’s a literary dystopian tale where Smith suggests that hope for a freer future may lie with those young enough to imagine it.
On the surface, “Twist” is about the repair of the undersea cables that link the global digital grid and power intercontinental communication — with cables on the ocean floor that “are only about the size of a garden hose.” But National Book Award-winning author Colum McCann uses the hidden infrastructure as a rich metaphor for the limits of connection in a hyperconnected world.
The novel is narrated by Anthony Fennell, a writer assigned to secure a piece about the team that scours sea beds to find and repair broken connections. He travels to Cape Town and meets Conway, the enigmatic leader tasked with the high-stakes mission. Fennell is intrigued by Conway’s life — his motivations and relationship with his beautiful partner, a South-African actress. He joins the expedition, but the assignment becomes a deeper journey into Conway’s past as well as his own sense of purpose.
McCann makes deliberate nods to Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” and crafts a symbolic narrative that probes the irony of our modern digital tethering: we are linked more than ever yet are more personally isolated. The novel’s twists lie not just in the plot, or the cables, but in the fragile, tangled connections between people.
One of this year’s highly anticipated literary releases is “Audition,” Katie Kitamura’s first novel since her National Book Award long-listed “Intimacies.” You will either be frustrated or compelled by this originally-constructed, two-part narrative — one without a definitive version of what is reality.
The story centers on an accomplished middle-age actress who meets for lunch with an attractive man half her age who then claims to be her son. From there, two divergent scenarios unfold: Part One tells one story, Part Two tells another. Are they sequential, alternatives, or parallel realities?
As the actress reflects on the art of performance — how personal interpretation and injecting one’s presence shapes a role — she confronts the blurred lines between identity, truth, and illusion. The young man’s sudden appearance disrupts the woman’s complacent routine of marriage and her relationship with her husband, revealing what lies beneath the surface.
With her trademark restraint and precision, Kitamura delivers a quiet and unsettling consideration of how identity is a performance, and the theatricality of the roles we inhabit in our daily lives — harkening back to the Shakespearean adage, “all the world’s a stage.”
