Vernon Hale

He went into the Alaska Interior to prove a man needs no one. Then the plane that was to fly him out never came.Robinson Crusoe, retold in the far north. Vernon Hale is a master woodsman, and the months alone he arranged for himself were not an escape but a summit: proof that a life can be whole and beholden to nothing. No crash, no storm. Only a sky that stays empty until the season closes around him and the truth arrives, slow as cold water: no one is coming.He is far too good at surviving for the wilderness to be the danger. A wound turns septic and the freeze-up seals the last way home, and still the real threat is the silence, and the thing his competence was built to hide.Then a half-wild dog drifts to the edge of his clearing, wary and masterless, as reverted as he is becoming. Neither needs the other. Across one long winter, without deciding to, the two of them begin to unmake and remake each other.Spare and unsparing, Vernon Hale trades Defoe's Providence for the harder consolations of Stoicism and Buddhism. A standalone literary novel about solitude, need, and the cost of being found, for readers of Peter Heller's The Dog Stars and Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child.