Gathering Light

Mattie Gokey is sixteen and living in the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York in 1906. She is working at a hotel on the lake while trying to hold together a struggling family. One day a guest, Grace Brown, hands her a bundle of letters and asks her to burn them. Mattie fully means to do as she is told.

The next day Grace is found drowned in Big Moose Lake, and Mattie finds she cannot simply throw the letters on the fire. As she reads them, Grace's story comes into focus. Alongside it runs Mattie's own story, made up of her hopes and ambitions for the future and her ties to her friends and family.

The novel draws on a real 1906 drowning at Big Moose Lake, the case that also inspired Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. In the United States the book was published as A Northern Light.