The Wild Heavens is an impressive and evocative debut, containing beauty, tragedy and wonder in equal parts. In The Wild Heavens, Sarah Louise Butler demonstrates an astonishing ability to mix an intense and precise attention to detail regarding the natural world. When the enigmatic tracks finally reappear, Sandy sets out on the trail alone, determined to find out the truth about the mystery that has shaped her life. The novel spans the course of single winter day, interspersed with memories from Sandy’s life-childhood days spent with her distracted, scholarly grandfather in a remote cabin in British Columbia’s interior mountains later recollections of new motherhood and then the tragic disappearance that would irrevocably shape the rest of her life, a day when all signs of the mysterious creature would disappear for thirty years. Also, the influence of Scripture on the morals of Christians.

The words sasquatch, bigfoot and yeti never occur in this novel, but that is what most people would call the hairy, nine-foot creature that would become a lifelong obsession for Aidan Fitzpatrick, and in turn, his granddaughter Sandy Langley. Doctrine of the spirit world respecting heaven, hell, morality, and God. It all starts with an impossibly large set of tracks, footprints for a creature that could not possibly exist.

The Wild Heavens by Sarah Louise Butler