Millay Society Author Series: Library Tea with Amity Gaige, Author of “Heartwood”

The Camden Public Library continues its Millay Society Author Series with a special Author Teatime and Discussion featuring Amity Gaige in our beautiful Reading Room. This event is open to Millay Society members and their invited guests.

Join us in welcoming Amity Gaige, author of the national bestseller Heartwood for an engaging conversation and Q & A while you enjoy teatime refreshments in our beautiful and historic Reading Room.

This event will take place on Saturday, October 25 at 3:30 p.m. Books will be available for purchase and signing. Millay Society members receive a 20% discount on book purchases! Be sure to let the salesperson know you are a member of the Millay Society.

Registration is required. Please RSVP below to save your seat!

Benefits of Millay Society membership include invitations to special literary events like this one. Members’ consistent contributions also enable the Library’s growth and community responsiveness. Additionally, member support helps ensure the Library’s continued place as a key cultural and intellectual center in Midcoast Maine.

---

About Heartwood

In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping.

At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who leads the search on the ground. Meanwhile, Lena, a seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher in a Connecticut retirement community, becomes an unexpected armchair detective. Roving between these compelling narratives, a puzzle emerges, intensifying the frantic search, as Valerie’s disappearance may not be accidental.

Heartwood is a “gem of a thousand facets—suspenseful, transporting, tender, and ultimately soul-mending,” (Megan Majumdar, New York Times bestselling author of A Burning) that tells the story of a lost hiker’s odyssey and is a moving rendering of each character’s interior journey. The mystery inspires larger questions about the many ways in which we get lost, and how we are found. At its core, Heartwood is a redemptive novel, written with both enormous literary ambition and love.

---

About the Author

Heartwood is Amity Gaige’s fifth novel. It was selected by Jenna Bush Hager as a Read with Jenna pick for April 2025 and became an instant national bestseller.

Amity is the author of four previous novels, O My Darling, The Folded World, Schroder, and Sea Wife. Sea Wife was a 2020 New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Mark Twain American Voice Award. Schroder was also a New York Times Notable Book and a best book of 2013 according to The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, among others, and was shortlisted for UK’s Folio Prize in 2014. In 2018, Amity was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction.

Amity has appeared on some of the biggest literary stages, from the LA Times Book Festival, the National Book Festival in D.C., and the Rome Festival of International Literature. She has made appearances on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” “Where We Live” and “All of It” with Allison Stewart, as well as spoken extensively at numerous universities. She lives with her family in West Hartford, Connecticut, and teaches at Yale.