The Stranger in the Woods
The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
by Michael Finkel
The recap
In 1986 a twenty-year-old named Christopher Knight fails to turn up for his job installing alarm systems in Massachusetts, drives north to Maine and walks into the woods. He stays there, near a lake called North Pond, for nearly three decades, without holding a real conversation with another human being. To get through the brutal Maine winters he quietly raids the seasonal cabins nearby, becoming the stuff of local legend as the North Pond Hermit. When he is finally caught in 2013, hundreds of reporters want his story, and he gives it to only one. Michael Finkel earns that trust slowly, through letters and visits, and the book is shaped by their halting, wary exchanges. Rather than a tidy explanation, it offers a portrait of a man who seems to want nothing from the world, and a meditation on what solitude gives and what it takes. Compact and strangely gripping, it leaves readers wondering how they would fare alone with their own thoughts for so long.
Why read it
For anyone who has ever fantasised about walking away from it all, and for readers who like their true stories odd, intimate and quietly philosophical.
Fun facts
- 01
Hundreds of journalists tried to reach Christopher Knight after his arrest; Finkel, who wrote him letters and visited him, was the only one he shared his story with.
- 02
Knight was arrested on April 4, 2013, during a break-in at a summer camp for people with disabilities in central Maine.
- 03
Over his years in the woods, Knight is estimated to have committed around one thousand burglaries to survive.
- 04
Knopf published the book in March 2017, and it became a New York Times bestseller.
