He traveled the world as an expedition kayaker, writing about challenging descents in the Pamirs, the Tien Shan mountains, the Caucuses, Central America and Peru.Īt the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received an MFA in fiction and poetry, he won a Michener fellowship for his epic poem “The Psalms of Malvine.” He has worked as a dishwasher, construction worker, logger, offshore fisherman, kayak instructor, river guide, and world class pizza deliverer. He attended high school in Vermont and Dartmouth College in New Hampshire where he became an outdoorsman and whitewater kayaker. The Dog Stars, his first novel, was published in 2012. He is an award winning adventure writer and the author of four books of literary nonfiction. Peter Heller is a longtime contributor to NPR, and a contributing editor at Outside Magazine, Men’s Journal, and National Geographic Adventure. Awards-Iowa Writers' Workshop's Michener Fellowship National Outdoor's Book Award.

Education-B.A., Dartmouth College M.F.A, Iowa Writers' Workshop.Narrated by a man who is part warrior and part dreamer, a hunter with a great shot and a heart that refuses to harden, The Dog Stars is both savagely funny and achingly sad, a breathtaking story about what it means to be human. But what he encounters and what he must face-in the people he meets, and in himself-is both better and worse than anything he could have hoped for. Risking everything, he flies past his point of no return-not enough fuel to get him home-following the trail of the static-broken voice on the radio. But when a random transmission somehow beams through his radio, the voice ignites a hope deep inside him that a better life-something like his old life-exists beyond the airport. In his 1956 Cessna, Hig flies the perimeter of the airfield or sneaks off to the mountains to fish and to pretend that things are the way they used to be.

His wife is gone, his friends are dead, he lives in the hangar of a small abandoned airport with his dog, his only neighbor a gun-toting misanthrope. Hig survived the flu that killed everyone he knows. A riveting, powerful novel about a pilot living in a world filled with loss-and what he is willing to risk to rediscover, against all odds, connection, love, and grace.

The dog stars book