“With The White Mary, journalist Kira Salak makes a stunning debut as a novelist. This is a story whose beauty and power sweeps you along, like the jungle rivers that bear her heroine into the heart of New Guinea in search of a vanished American. In the tradition of Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim and Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter, The White Mary is a superb adventure tale that explores the human soul, a tale of a physical journey that frames a spiritual quest for love and meaning in a world sadly deficient in both.” —Philip Caputo

“One cannot write well about people risking their lives without having done it oneself; suffice it to say that Kira Salak is profoundly convincing on the topic. Salak's got it: That ability to capture the world in all its beauty and darkness and violence without romanticizing it. This is a book borne of the years that Salak spent as a journalist and traveler in some of the most terrifying places in the world, but she has held on to her basic humanity through it all. That essential humanity is what elevates The White Mary--and all of Salak's work--from mere ‘adventure writing' to true literature. The reader is changed by it--changed in the same way Salak must have been, many times over, in the writing of it. This is a truly inspiring book about the kind of place I have spent many years reporting from. There is no doubt: She nailed it.” —Sebastian Junger

“Minutely observed and utterly mesmerizing . . . rendered in Salak's artfully unadorned, fast-paced prose--a style reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, with an ample supply of his bleakness and violence. There are also shades of Heart of Darkness . . . both books are obsessive searches through inhospitable lands for a lost soul.” —Michael Finkel, National Geographic Adventure

“There are echoes of Heart of Darkness in this riveting novel about a globe-trotting American journalist's attempt to track down a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent who is supposed to have committed suicide in New Guinea but is rumored to be alive. . . [Salak's] first-hand knowledge of jungle life there yields many harrowing, unforgettable passages.” —John Marshall, Seattle Post-Intelligencer