The God of the Woods: A Novel

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER and ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR

A NEW YORK TIMES "BEST THRILLER" and "BEST CRIME NOVEL" OF THE YEAR

PEOPLE MAGAZINE’S #1 BOOK OF THE YEAR

“Extraordinary . . . Reminds me of Donna Tartt’s 1992 debut, The Secret History . . . I was so thoroughly submerged in a rich fictional world, that for hours I barely came up for air.” —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air, NPR

“This expertly paced thriller …has the kineticism of a well-crafted miniseries.” —The New Yorker

When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.

Liz Moore is the author of five novels: The Words of Every Song, Heft, The Unseen World, the New York Times-bestselling Long Bright River, and The God of the Woods. A winner of the 2014 Rome Prize in Literature, she lives in Philadelphia and teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at Temple University.

Praise for The God of the Woods:

“The God of the Woods, like The Secret History, transports readers so deeply into its richly peopled, ominous world that, for hours, everything else falls away. . . . Breaking free of the spell Moore casts is close to impossible.”
—Washington Post

“This expertly paced thriller ...has the kineticism of a well-crafted miniseries.”
—The New Yorker

“Hugely satisfying . . . . Moore cleverly guides us through that tangle of trails, to a thrilling and unexpected conclusion.”
—Boston Globe

“Liz Moore’s extraordinary new literary suspense novel reminds me of Donna Tartt’s 1992 debut, The Secret History. . . . [T]he vital connection for me was a reading experience where I was so thoroughly submerged in a rich fictional world, that for hours I barely came up for air. . . . The precision of Moore’s writing never flags. . . . Unforgettable.”
—Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air, NPR

"Her fictional summer camp felt as vivid to me as my own."
— The New York Times

"A long novel that at first is hard to put down. By page 200, impossible." —Stephen King

"An unusually gratifying reading experience . . . Three days after you turn the last page, your head is still half in it. It's as if you can smell the pine and wood smoke. . . . Moore has written an atmospheric family drama, a social novel and the best kind of missing persons story, one that's fun to read and think about.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Intercutting past and present, Moore keeps the suspense at a fever pitch amid nuanced portraits of the out-of-touch Van Laars, their hangers-on and the locals who both depend on and resent them. A winner.”
—People

“Clear your afternoon: This absorbing story, told by a compelling cast of characters, is unputdownable.”
—Real Simple

“Part riveting thriller and part family drama, Liz Moore’s novel plays on the uncomfortable truths of favoritism and family dynamics in this nail-biter that will keep you from wandering alone in the woods for quite some time.”
—Huffington Post

“An immersive reading experience that will draw audiences. Its explorations of class, crime, and family dynamics, in addition to Moore’s incredible storytelling, will appeal to readers of Lisa Jewell, Tana French, and Lucy Foley.”
—Library Journal, STARRED review

“Rich in background detail and secondary mysteries . . . this ever-expansive, intricate, emotionally engaging novel never seems overplotted. Every piece falls skillfully into place and every character, major and minor, leaves an imprint.”
—Kirkus, STARRED review

“Gripping and revelatory . . . The beautiful and dangerous wilderness setting enhances the suspense as the narrative builds to a dramatic final act. . . . This astonishes.”
—Publishers Weekly, STARRED review

“A compulsively readable novel that will appeal to fans of mysteries and historical fiction alike.”
—Booklist, STARRED review

Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods is a tense, atmospheric literary mystery that unfolds in the Adirondacks and slowly reveals the secrets of a wealthy family, a missing child, and a community shaped by class, grief, and power. The novel begins with a disappearance that immediately unsettles everyone around it: a teenage girl vanishes from a summer camp in the woods. This is not just any camper, but Barbara Van Laar, the daughter of the powerful family that owns the land and has long dominated the region. Her disappearance is especially haunting because it echoes an older family tragedy. Years earlier, Barbara’s little brother Bear also disappeared under mysterious circumstances and was never found. From the start, the novel makes it clear that Barbara’s vanishing cannot be seen as an isolated event. It reopens old wounds, revives old suspicions, and forces people to confront truths they have avoided for years.

The setting is one of the novel’s greatest strengths. The woods are not just a backdrop but a living presence in the story. They are beautiful, ancient, and unsettling, holding both freedom and danger. The camp, the family estate, and the surrounding rural community all exist under the shadow of this wilderness, and Moore uses that environment to create a mood of constant unease. The forest seems to absorb memory and conceal evidence, and the deeper the story goes, the more it feels as if the land itself is tied to the Van Laars’ history. This atmosphere gives the book a haunting quality, but it also supports one of its central ideas: that beneath polished surfaces and carefully managed reputations, something wild and unspoken is always waiting.

As the investigation into Barbara’s disappearance unfolds, the novel moves across different points of view and timelines, gradually building a layered portrait of the people connected to the case. Rather than rushing from clue to clue in a conventional thriller style, Moore takes her time, allowing each perspective to add emotional and social depth. The Van Laar family, despite their wealth and influence, are far from stable. Their grief over Bear’s disappearance has never healed cleanly, and the family has become marked by silence, denial, and emotional distance. Barbara herself is not portrayed simply as a victim. She is a complicated young girl, observant and restless, shaped by privilege but also constrained by it. Her disappearance forces others to reckon not only with what may have happened to her, but with who she really was when she was alive and visible.

The novel also pays close attention to the people outside the family’s circle of power. Camp staff, local workers, law enforcement, and women whose lives are often treated as less important all become essential to the story. Through them, Moore explores the class divisions that define the region. The Van Laars may own the camp and much of the surrounding world in a practical sense, but they do not fully understand the people who work for them or live in their shadow. This imbalance of power affects everything, including whose voices are heard, whose mistakes are forgiven, and whose suffering is ignored. One of the book’s quiet achievements is the way it shows that disappearances do not happen in a vacuum. They occur inside a social structure where money, status, gender, and fear influence every search and every narrative.

A major thread in the novel concerns women and the ways they are overlooked, disbelieved, or trapped within roles designed by others. Moore is especially interested in the emotional and practical burdens placed on women, whether they are mothers, daughters, counselors, wives, or workers. Many of the women in the story have learned to survive by paying close attention, by noticing what men dismiss, and by enduring systems that rarely protect them fully. As the mystery deepens, these women become crucial not just because they hold pieces of information, but because they understand dynamics of control and vulnerability that others fail to see. The novel’s suspense grows not only from the question of where Barbara is, but from the gradual realization that the truth has long been shaped by whose pain counted and whose did not.

The parallel between Barbara’s disappearance and Bear’s earlier vanishing gives the novel much of its emotional weight. Bear has become almost mythic in family memory, a lost golden child whose absence poisoned everything that followed. Yet as the story peels back layers of history, the reader begins to see that memory can distort as much as it preserves. The Van Laars’ version of themselves, like the image of their vanished son, has been protected by wealth and by the community’s reluctance to challenge them. Barbara’s disappearance destabilizes that protection. It begins to expose how much of the family’s history rests on secrecy, selective storytelling, and emotional repression. What seemed at first like a tragic mystery starts to look more like the result of generations of buried damage.

The investigation itself is absorbing because it is rooted as much in human behavior as in plot mechanics. Moore is less interested in flashy twists than in the slow accumulation of truth. Each revelation reshapes not only the case but the reader’s understanding of the characters. Motives are rarely simple, and innocence or guilt do not fall into neat categories. The novel understands that people can be harmed and harmful at the same time, and that trauma often ripples outward in ways no one fully controls. This gives the story a literary richness that goes beyond solving a puzzle. The mystery matters, but what matters just as much is the emotional and moral landscape around it.

As the novel moves toward its resolution, long-buried secrets come into view, and the links between past and present become devastatingly clear. The answer to what happened is not random, and it is not detached from the family’s power or from the emotional patterns that have shaped their lives. Moore carefully shows how silence can become a kind of inheritance, passed from one generation to the next, until it finally produces catastrophe. The ending is powerful not because it offers easy closure, but because it forces recognition. People who have lived within false versions of their family, their community, or themselves must confront what has really been there all along.

What makes The God of the Woods so memorable is the way it combines suspense with psychological depth and social insight. It is a missing-person story, but it is also a novel about class privilege, family mythology, childhood vulnerability, and the hidden costs of power. Liz Moore writes with patience and precision, allowing tension to build through character, setting, and emotional detail rather than relying only on shock. The woods remain a fitting symbol throughout: dense, beautiful, and full of things that cannot stay buried forever. In the end, the novel suggests that the most dangerous secrets are not only the ones hidden in the forest, but the ones families and communities choose to protect in plain sight.