Peter Heller: The River @ Colorado Chautauqua Community House

From the best-selling author of “The Dog Stars,” Peter Heller returns with “The River,” a story of two college students on a wilderness canoe trip. This gripping tale follows the course of a friendship tested by fire, white-water and violence.

Wynn and Jack have been best friends since freshman orientation, bonded by their shared love of mountains, books and fishing. Wynn is a gentle giant, a Vermont kid never happier than when his feet are in the water. Jack is more rugged, raised on a ranch in Colorado where sleeping under the stars and cooking on a fire came as naturally to him as breathing. When they decide to canoe the Maskwa River in northern Canada, they anticipate long days of leisurely paddling and picking blueberries, and nights of stargazing and reading paperback Westerns. When an unexpected wildfire makes its way across the forest, unpredictable urgency is added to the journey. Another layer of complication forms when they hear a man and woman arguing on the fog-shrouded riverbank and the pair decide to warn them about the fire. Their search for the couple becomes puzzling when the next day a man appears on the river, paddling alone. Is this the man they heard? If he is, where is the woman? From this charged beginning, master storyteller Peter Heller unspools a headlong, heart-pounding story of desperate wilderness survival.

About the Author:
Peter Heller is the best-selling author of “The Painter” and “The Dog Stars.” An award-winning adventure writer and a longtime contributor to NPR, Heller is a contributing editor at Outside magazine, Men’s Journal and National Geographic Adventure, and a regular contributor to Bloomberg Businessweek. He is also the author of several nonfiction books, including “Kook,” “The Whale Warriors” and “Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet’s Tsangpo River.” He lives in Denver, Colorado.

Running time:
45 minute to 1 hour talk + 15 minute Q&A