Fresh on the heels of 2017 bestseller Celine, Peter Heller has struck gold again with The River, about two college friends whose peaceful camping trip turns into a nightmarish combination of natural dangers, life-threatening disasters and human malice.

Dartmouth classmates Jack and Wynn have cleared a few weeks for fly-fishing and whitewater canoeing in northern Canada. Raised on a ranch in Colorado, Jack finds camping and hunting to be as natural as breathing. Wynn is a gentle soul from rural Vermont whose random trailside installations of stones, twigs and flowers do not take away from his acumen out of doors. The young men share a love of literature and outdoor sport, and imagine their two-week trek to be one of leisurely paddling, blueberry picking and reading around the campfire. This idyll is abruptly shattered when they sniff out the fumes of a swiftly approaching forest fire. Wynn and Jack agree to turn back and warn a couple they heard arguing the day before. This proves to be a fateful decision, as the woman, Maia, is found injured and bloody, and her husband, Pierre, no longer on the scene. The two men, with the badly shocked Maia in tow, are now on the run from the fire and, equally threatening, from a possibly homicidal husband. As if this weren't bad enough, the crises put a strain on the two men, and an element of mistrust creeps into their friendship.

Masterfully paced and artfully told, The River is a page turner that demands the reader slow down and relish the sheer poetry of the language. Heller is an experienced outdoorsman and has an extensive background in journalism, having written for Outside and Men's Magazine and with several nonfiction books on surfing, camping and fishing to his long list of credits—and his familiarity with all facets of the river trip shows. Though stories of man versus nature date back to the Odyssey, The River thrills as Heller invites his characters to confront their own mortality without losing sight of the deep connections between humans and their environment.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Peter Heller for The River.

Tight as a good, strong handshake since freshman orientation, gentle Wynn and scrappy Jack decide to canoe northern Canada's Maskwa River together. But the journey doesn't turn out to be the dreamy, star-gazing experience they had eagerly anticipated. A wildfire threatens, and when they seek to warn a man and a woman they hear arguing on a distant, fog-ridden shore, they can't even find them. But the next day they see a man paddling the river alone, launching a lot of questions and finally a terrible fight for survival.

"They'd been smelling smoke for days." So opens Heller's fourth novel (after Celine), foretelling a disastrous outcome for what begins as a leisurely canoe trip by best friends Jack and Wynn. Experienced wilderness instructors, they paddle through creeks, white water, and a river in northern Ontario and soon encounter a creepy pair of drunk campers, whom they try to warn about the oncoming wildfire. When they hear a couple arguing at another campsite, they decide not to interfere, but the husband, Pierre, later arrives at their campsite disoriented and disheveled because wife Maia has disappeared into the woods after their argument and never returned. When Jack and Wynn travel back upstream to search for her, they find her barely alive, but how was she injured? The drunk campers? Pierre? A bear? Jack and Wynn find further trouble when they return to their campsite, and the two men are tested beyond endurance, with tragic results. VERDICT Using an artist's eye to describe Jack and Wynn's wilderness world, Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist Heller has transformed his own outdoor experiences into a heart-pounding adventure that's hard to put down. [See Prepub Alert, 9/10/18.]—Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO

Heller (Celine) explores human relationships buffeted by outside forces in his suspenseful latest. The central friendship is between two young men, Wynn and Jack, students who have taken a leave of absence from Dartmouth to explore the Canadian wilderness. Their late summer canoe trip, however, finds them pursued by two dangerous natural foes—a rapidly advancing wildfire and the equally swift approach of freezing temperatures. Their trip is further complicated when the two men's intervention in a domestic drama results in the addition of a deeply traumatized woman, Maia, to their traveling party. Short on supplies, racing against disaster toward civilization, Jack and Wynn's loyalties to one another are repeatedly strained. Jack and Wynn—who are both effortlessly erudite while also seemingly adept at virtually every skill of the outdoorsman—may be too well-rounded to be entirely believable. Their motivations are convincing, however, especially when nature's violence rekindles Jack's memories of his mother's accidental death years earlier. Maia, conversely, can at times feel more like a plot device than like a woman with an inherently dramatic story of her own. Nevertheless, with its evocative descriptions of nature's splendor and brutality, Heller's novel beautifully depicts the powers that can drive humans apart—and those that compel them to return repeatedly to one another. (Mar.)