A Room in the Forest

Nineteen-year-old Lily knows she doesn’t belong at a dead-end job in her father’s small-town Alberta furniture store, not when she’s been offered a job in the ancient forests of Haida Gwaii. But her search for a sense of place becomes more complicated when a band of tree planters she meets on the road question her assumptions about whose land she is moving towards. Once at the logging camp, the rugged work and her rough co-workers make her even more uncertain about where she fits in.

While measuring trees, Lily sees a mysterious figure who disappeared into the forest years before. Is he a man or a myth? Everyone has a different opinion. With a logging protest looming, Lily’s coworker and sometimes-friend, Chaz—a young half-Haida man whose white father owns the logging camp—ditches his job thanks to his uncle’s influence. As she meets more locals and learns about the community, Lily discovers surprising secrets about her estranged mother’s time in the area—and that her connection to this place may not be what she thought. Do the rumours Lily keeps hearing about a mysterious hermit have anything to do with her? As more and more questions rise to the surface, Lily plunges deeper into the forest to find out.

Former Haida Gwaii reporter and freelance writer Heather Ramsay makes her fiction debut with a startling coming-of-age novel about challenging old beliefs and finding one’s place in the world.