Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert will publish her fourth novel next year, Riverhead announced in a news release.
The press will publish The Snow Forest in 2024. It describes the novel as “a riveting story about one family’s survival in a remote and beautiful wilderness, and a mystical connection between humans and nature.”
The novel is Gilbert’s first since City of Girls, which Riverhead published in 2019. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called that book “a big old banana split of a book, surely the cure for what ails you.”
The Snow Forest follows a religious Siberian family that has lived in isolation for more than four decades and the scholar who is sent to study them. The novel is inspired by the true story of the Lykov family, chronicled in Vasily Peskov’s 1994 book, Lost in the Taiga: One Russian Family’s Fifty-Year Struggle for Survival and Religious Freedom in the Siberian Wilderness.
Gilbert announced her new novel on Instagram, writing, “I spent the first year of covid living alone in the middle of nowhere. I found that the silence and isolation was actually a magical time for my own creative and spiritual life, as well as my connection to nature. I found myself increasingly fascinated by the idea of what it would be like to spend one’s life absolutely separated from the world: what would the most extreme version of this fantasy be like? Is there anyone out there living like this?”
The Snow Forest is slated for publication on Feb. 13, 2024.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
