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.