Set in north-central Pennsylvania at the turn of the 20th century, Heartwood is an inspiring and heart-rending novel that traces the intertwined lives of two men with common roots in the rugged timbering industry, but whose destinies and love for Cassandra Erhart, daughter of an industrialist, turn them against each other. Heartwood is a loving and careful preservation of a precious part of American history that has all but vanished.

This story of place and a man’s search for significance amidst clashing worlds of humans and nature is more than the tragedy and triumph of Tobias Meier’s passage from woodsman to ostracized heir. His leaving a landscape he knows and to which he is connected spiritually, moving on in pursuit of false opportunity, illuminates the larger-scale sacrifices tolled on an increasingly transient America. Heartwood contemplates what is lost as civilization expands, natural places disappear, and technology renders steadfast traditions obsolete.

The scenes of Heartwood, which Jack Driscoll, author of How Like An Angel, calls cinematic, take place in logging camps and the sooty innards of an arc light factory, in the homes of lumber tycoons and the drafty bedrooms of company houses, during a bear hunt and in a parlor room in 1913’s finest New York hotel.

The story of Tobias is intertwined with the rise of an empire and the ones who built it, one of the multi-faceted ventures that farmed the region’s natural resources to build the little industrial towns of Pennsylvania. As was true with many of these family operations, the empire follows the economic cycles of the new century and it impacts most every life in the town it occupies. Tobias and the protagonist will choose paths that follow the tide of this empire, and one will get swept into it.