Wynn is a gentle giant, a Vermont kid never happier than when his feet are in the water. Wynn and Jack have been best friends since college orientation, bonded by their shared love of mountains, books, and fishing. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in poetry and fiction. 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.

Heller is also the author of four nonfiction books, including Kook: What Surfing Taught Me About Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave, which was awarded the National Outdoor Book Award for Literature, Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet’s Tsango River, and The Whale Warriors: The Battle at the Bottom of the World to Save the Planet’s Largest Mammal. The Painter was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the prestigious Reading the West Book Award, shared in the past by Western writers such as Cormac McCarthy and Terry Tempest Williams, and The Dog Stars, which was published to critical acclaim and lauded as a breakout bestseller, has been published in twenty-two languages to date. Heller has also written the novels Celine, The Painter, and The Dog Stars. His previous linked novels, The River and The Guide, follow the story of two college students on a wilderness canoe trip–a gripping tale of a friendship tested by fire, white water, and violence – and then returns to Jack in The Guide, who is hired by an elite fishing lodge in Colorado, where he uncovers a plot of shocking menace amid the natural beauty of sun-drenched streams and forests. Peter Heller is the national best-selling author of The Last Ranger (August 2023), a vibrant, lyrical mystery set in Yellowstone National Park where a skirmish between a local hunter and a wolf biologist turns violent, and a park ranger, adrift in his own life, becomes obsessed with discovering the truth.

The dog stars by peter heller