The River

Description

'I COULDN'T TURN THE PAGES FAST ENOUGH' Clare Mackintosh 'BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN AND UNBEARABLY TENSE' Observer 'UTTER JOY... GLORIOUS DRAMA AND LYRICAL FLAIR' Denise Mina, New York Times TWO FRIENDS Wynn and Jack have been best friends since their first day of college, brought together by their shared love of the great outdoors. THE ADVENTURE OF A LIFETIME When they decide to take time off university, canoeing down the Maskwa River in northern Canada, they anticipate the ultimate wilderness adventure. No phones. No fellow travellers. No going back. A HELLISH RIDE But as a raging wildfire starts to make its way towards them and they stumble across a woman who has been brutally attacked and left for dead, the desperate race for survival becomes a much deadlier game of cat and mouse.

PETER HELLER is the award-winning author of THE DOG STARS, a New York Times bestseller and a Guardian, San Francisco Chronicle and Atlantic Book of the Year, and THE RIVER, an Observer Thriller of the Year. Born and raised in New York, he has travelled the world as an expedition kayaker, writing about challenging descents in the Pamirs, the Tien Shan mountains, the Caucuses, Central America and Peru. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he received an MFA in fiction and poetry, and won a Michener fellowship for his epic poem 'The Psalms of Malvine'.

Both beautifully written, a crisp, ice-cold immersion in the glory of the wilderness, and unbearably tense. - Observer Utter joy... A suspenseful tale told with glorious drama and lyrical flair... The River is a fiction addition to the New Landscape writing of Robert Macfarlane and Rebecca Solnit, prose so vivid and engaging that a city-dwelling reviewer can feel the clammy cold of a fog over a river or the heat of subterranean tree roots burning underfoot in the aftermath of a fire. - Denise Mina, New York Times Where Heller really scores is the extraordinarily high quality of his writing about the natural world, which is lyrical and action-packed by turns. - Guardian