Erica Ferencik

Erica Ferencik came to novels by a crooked route: roughly ten years of standup and sketch comedy, dozens of screenplays, and graduate work in creative writing at Boston University. Into the Jungle, from 2019, follows Lily Bushwold, a rootless young American scraping a living in Bolivia, who attaches herself to a man named Omar and travels far up river with him to a village the outside world barely reaches. Ferencik rafted the Amazon in Peru while writing it. The River at Night, her first thriller, strands four friends in the Maine backcountry; Girl in Ice moved her north to the Arctic.