Wander

**Winner of the 2017 Nancy Pearl Book Award for Best Book of Fiction (Literary/Mainstream) from the Pacific Northwest Writer's Association Set in the 1980s in the rural community of Bidarkee Bay, Alaska, a fictional area the size of a small state with a population of barely 20,000, Wander is the story of Patrice Pete Nash, a young broadcast reporter who finds herself facing the winter alone after her husband, Nate, accepts a job on the slope. As Pete pursues the next big breaking news story, she strikes up a friendship with the new guy in town, the Ivy League-educated Ren, who recites poetry and lives in the family-owned, vacant inn. Their friendship offers a glimpse of a different kind of life one that seems to Pete to offer everything marriage to the country-raised Nate does not. But unbeknown to Pete, Ren has come to Alaska for his own dark reasons to end his life. By the time, Nate returns home, their lives have been irrevocably changed. One man is dead, two others missing and a third forever lost to them.