NEW YORK, July 2, 2024 — Liz Moore has been writing for fifteen years, across four novels, and she has been very good for all of them. HEFT was serious literary fiction. THE UNSEEN WORLD was serious literary fiction with a genre-adjacent puzzle at its center. LONG BRIGHT RIVER was the book that revealed how much Moore’s specific gifts were suited to the machinery of suspense, and it made her, for the first time, a bestseller. THE GOD OF THE WOODS, publishing today from Riverhead Books, is the novel in which every skill she has developed converges. It is the book of the summer, and, on the evidence of the earliest response, one of the most important literary suspense novels of the decade.

The premise is deceptively simple. A thirteen-year-old girl named Barbara Van Laar goes missing from a summer camp in the Adirondacks in 1975. The camp is owned by her wealthy family. Fourteen years earlier, in the same woods, her older brother Bear disappeared and was never found. Moore’s novel, structured across multiple decades and multiple points of view, follows the search for Barbara through the specific terrain, both physical and moral, of a family and a place that have been keeping their own secrets for a long time.

Why the Structure Is the Novel’s First Great Accomplishment

The temptation, with a premise like this, is to write a linear thriller. Moore refuses. THE GOD OF THE WOODS is a novel of overlapping perspectives, alternating decades, and slowly converging information. The reader learns what happened to Bear only in fragments, from characters who each know a piece, and the reader learns what happened to Barbara through the same architecture. The result is a novel that reads with the propulsion of a thriller and the density of a nineteenth-century family novel, and that trusts its reader to hold multiple timelines in mind for the six or seven hours the book will take to complete.

What Moore is doing with this structure is not merely a technical exercise. It is a moral one. The novel is, at its deepest level, a book about how families and institutions and small towns keep secrets across generations, and about how those secrets require multiple perspectives to see clearly. A linear thriller could not have carried the argument. Moore’s braided novel does.

The Adirondacks as Character

Every serious summer-camp novel understands that the setting is not a setting. It is a character. THE GOD OF THE WOODS renders the Adirondacks (the specific stretch of upstate New York wilderness, the specific economy of camps and lodges and old-money families, the specific class structures that overlay the region, the specific quality of light in a July afternoon on a lake) with the patience of a novelist who has spent a lot of time in the place she is describing. The woods in the novel’s title are not incidental. They are the container inside which the entire moral action of the book takes place, and they are rendered with the density that literary fiction knows how to give a landscape when it takes the landscape seriously.

This is the specific gift Moore brings to suspense that most of her genre contemporaries do not. Setting, in her novels, is doing at least as much work as plot. Readers who finish THE GOD OF THE WOODS will remember the missing girl. They will also, and this is unusual, remember the specific weight of the trees, the specific sound of a canoe on a lake at five in the morning, and the specific texture of a wealthy family’s summer compound in the years when American money had begun to shift but the compounds had not yet noticed.

Why It Matters

Literary suspense as a category has been in an unusually strong phase for several years. Tana French set the modern standard. Denise Mina refined it. Attica Locke, Jane Harper, and Megan Abbott have expanded it in various directions. What Moore has done, and what THE GOD OF THE WOODS confirms, is bring to the category a specific kind of American literary novelist’s sensibility: research-driven, character-patient, structurally ambitious, and morally serious. She is, on the evidence of this novel, one of the two or three most important American writers currently working in the space where literary fiction and suspense meet.

The book club uptake, in the weeks leading up to publication, has already been extraordinary. Independent bookstores across the country have positioned it as their summer flagship recommendation. Foreign rights have sold into more than twenty territories. A television adaptation has been in development for months. All of that is real. None of it, however, is the reason the novel matters. THE GOD OF THE WOODS matters because it is, at four hundred and eighty pages, the kind of book a serious reader finishes and immediately begins pressing on other serious readers, because they need someone else to have finished it too.

This is the novel of Moore’s career so far. The audience that has been waiting for her to publish it has already arrived.

THE GOD OF THE WOODS by Liz Moore is available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook wherever books are sold. Published by Riverhead Books.

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