Author of THE LOST GIRLS
(William Morrow/HarperCollins, July 26, 2016)
After a decade practicing law and another decade raising kids, Heather decided to finally write the novel she’d always talked about writing.
She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and is an alumnus of the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop and the Tin House Writers Workshop, all of which helped her stop writing like a lawyer. She lives in Mill Valley, California, with her husband and two teenaged children. When she’s not writing she’s biking, hiking, neglecting potted plants, and reading books by other people that she wishes she’d written.
Read Heather’s Debutante Ball posts.
Find Heather at: Her Website * Twitter * Facebook
About THE LOST GIRLS
In 1935, six-year-old Emily vanishes from her family’s vacation home on a remote Minnesota lake. Her mother stays there for the rest of her life, hoping her favorite child will walk out of the woods. Her sisters stay, too. But they aren’t waiting for Emily. They know she isn’t coming back.
Now Lucy, the quiet and watchful middle sister, is the only Evans girl left. What happened to Emily is a secret she promised would die with her. But as her life wanes, the lake house whispers with recriminations she can no longer ignore, and her promise feels less like loyalty and more like cowardice. So she writes the story of that summer in a notebook. She leaves it, along with the house, to the only person to whom it might matter: her grandniece Justine.
Justine sees the lake house as a chance to escape her manipulative boyfriend and — maybe — give her daughters the stable home she never had. But it’s the beginning of the Minnesota winter. The house is dilapidated and cold, and her only neighbor is a strange old man who knows more than he’s telling about the summer of 1935. Soon her troubled oldest daughter becomes obsessed with the long-ago tragedy, her mother arrives with designs on her inheritance, and her boyfriend launches a dangerous plan to get her back. In a house haunted by the sins of the women who came before her, Justine must find a strength none of them possessed in order to save herself and her children.
Through the interwoven stories of Lucy and Justine, THE LOST GIRLS examines the price of loyalty, the burden of remorse, and the meaning of salvation.
