Peggy Townsend is an award-winning journalist and author. Her work has appeared in Catamaran literary magazine, Santa Cruz Noir, The Boston Globe Magazine, Memoir, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. Twice she lived for seven weeks in her van, traveling to Alaska and along the back roads of the U.S.
Townsend's new novel is The Beautiful and the Wild.
At CrimeReads she tagged five favorite wilderness thrillers featuring fearless women, including:
In Lauren Groff’s compelling The Vaster Wilds, we only know her protagonist as “the girl” but we quickly come to realize she is so much more. Fleeing from anRead about the other entries on the list.early American colony where famine lives hand in hand with violence, “the girl” plunges into the wild in search of freedom and is soon swallowed by a beautiful and unforgiving landscape.
She steals from the dead, roasts baby squirrels, robs honey from a swarm of angry bees, gobbles mushrooms without being certain if they are poisonous or not, and feasts on salmon she catches and smokes. Her shoes and clothes rot. Starvation and danger hunt her and, yet, the girl faces her suffering, not with surrender, but with determination. I was moved by her trials, which Groff renders in gorgeous prose, but also inspired by the notion that giving up at the first sign of an obstacle is the bigger failure. I quickly consumed this book.
--Marshal Zeringue
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