Wynn and Jack have been best friends since freshman orientation. Since they both enjoy the outdoors, they design a wilderness canoe trip in remote northern Canada to test their skills and hone their friendship. The young men forgo the safety of carrying a satellite phone, and though their timing is excellent for avoiding the worst of insects, their trip is imperiled by a raging forest fire, and complicated by their discovery of a severely injured woman they must get to a hospital. The intrigue and desperation Wynn and Jack must feel doesn't quite come through to the listener. The details of the early autumn forest, canoeing, portaging, and fly-fishing are spot on, as are the descriptions of the raging fire and its aftermath. Vocal characterizations by Mark Deakins are excellent, though Heller (Celine) doesn't give either Wynn or Jack much in the way of personality. VERDICT Recommended for adult audio fiction collections. Heller is very popular and patrons will certainly want to check out this one.--Cliff Glaviano, formerly with Bowling Green State Univ. Libs., OH

JACK AND WYNN, college-student and childhood friends, are canoeing and camping in northern Canada. Both are young but experienced outdoorsmen who have been flown in and dropped at a barely mapped river in the middle of hundreds of miles of forest. They have deliberately chosen not to bring a satellite phone so that they can experience the spirit of the pioneers they revere. Peter Heller's "The River" opens with the pair canoeing through fog and hearing a man and woman having a furious argument somewhere on shore. The sound is carried across the water, but the vegetation is so thick they can't see anyone. They don't know if they should hurry past or stop and intervene. It's a striking premise: the majesty of the vast Canadian wilderness juxtaposed with a confusingly awkward social situation. A few hours later, the stakes are raised when the smell of smoke wafts in on the wind: A wildfire has gripped the forest and is headed their way. They decide to turn back to warn the warring couple. After searching, they finally encounter the man alone. He says he lost his wife in the fog, but he has a wild, shifty look in his eye and an inexplicable injury to his leg. Jack and Wynn go to look for the woman, heading ever closer to the fire. Humans are both the victims and source of corruption in this novel. Initially it reads as slightly puritanical - drunks are bad, fat people are dumb, Jack and Wynn are handsome and good at everything - but this tendency reverses so completely and shockingly at the end that it can almost, but not quite, knock any smugness from a reader. The real delight is the nature writing. "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. Heller, the author of "The Dog Stars" and other novels, has an extraordinary facility for describing topography and vegetation; we can feel the sharpness of the rocks and the trilling excitement of the river as it approaches rapids. He brilliantly describes the physical process of wild living - shaking snowflakes of frost from a sleeping bag in the morning "like an icy hatch of mayflies," the joy of drinking sweet tea on a cold beach. Early encounters with wildlife become eerie as the animals disappear, fleeing the fire. There is a tendency toward status-flagging in this novel. A character with vital information is unconscious for a good deal of the story and comes to only to tell us that she is a "Rhode Island Brown" and to brag about her publications. I didn't need to know that Jack and Wynn are at Dartmouth, nor that they got in with ease. This social positioning tempers the peril a little, making the boys seem like adventuretourists who could have done something else with their academic sabbaticals. But none of that really affects the utter joy contained in this book, which is a suspenseful tale told with glorious drama and lyrical flair. ? DENISE MINA'S next novel, "Conviction," will be published in May.

Two college friends' leisurely river trek becomes an ordeal of fire and human malice.For his fourth novel, Heller swaps the post-apocalyptic setting of his previous book, The Dog Stars (2012), for present-day realismin this case a river in northern Canada where Dartmouth classmates Jack and Wynn have cleared a few weeks for fly-fishing and whitewater canoeing. Jack is the sharp-elbowed scion of a Colorado ranch family, while Wynn is a more easygoing Vermontera divide that becomes more stark as the novel progressesbut they share a love of books and the outdoors. They're so in sync early on that they agree to lose travel time to turn back and warn a couple they'd overheard arguing that a forest fire is fast approaching. It's a fateful decision: They discover the woman, Maia, near death and badly injured, apparently by her homicidal husband, Pierre. When Wynn unthinkingly radios Pierre that she's been found alive, Wynn and Jack realize they're now targets as well. Heller confidently manages a host of tensionsJack and Wynn becoming suspicious of each other while watching for Pierre, straining to keep Maia alive, and paddling upriver to reach civilization and escape the nearing blaze. And his pacing is masterful as well, briskly but calmly capturing the scenery in slower moments, then running full-throttle and shifting to barreling prose when danger is imminent. (The fire sounds like "turbines and the sudden shear of a strafing plane, a thousand thumping hooves in cavalcade, the clamor and thud of shields clashing, the swelling applause of multitudes.") And though the tale is a familiar one of fending off the deadliness of the wilderness and one's fellow man, Heller has such a solid grasp of nature (both human and the outdoors) that the storytelling feels fresh and affecting. In bringing his characters to the brink of death (and past it), Heller speaks soberly to the random perils of everyday living.An exhilarating tale delivered with the pace of a thriller and the wisdom of a grizzled nature guide. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Taking time off from jobs and classes, Dartmouth pals and consummate outdoorsmen Jack and Wynn, "diehards nostalgic for the days of the voyageurs," undertake a weeks-long canoe trip in Northern Canada. Colorado rancher's son Jack is the quicker-witted, tougher of the two, while Wynn's sensitive connection to nature stems from his Vermont youth spent steeped in art and literature. The boys' fluency with one another and the rugged landscape is quickly tested, though, by an encroaching wildfire and their unknowing entry into an argument between the married couple they try to warn about it. Disasters, growing in severity, eat away at their provisions and their sanity. Heller (Celine, 2017) once again chronicles life-or-death adventure with empathy for the natural world and the characters who people it. He writes most mightily of the boys' friendship and their beloved, uncompromising wilderness, depicting those layers of life that lie far beyond what is more commonly seen: the fire's unapologetic threats, the wisdom of the birds and animals seeking their own safety, and the language of the river itself.--Annie Bostrom Copyright 2019 Booklist

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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.