The forest and waters come alive in children’s book author Brian J. Heinz’s latest, Adirondack Spring (North Country Books, 2026), overflowing with engaging critter portraits by Michelle Garlock (32 pages, hardcover, $19.95, color illustrations, www.globepequot.com.
Anne LaBastille’s book Woodswoman, recounting her life in a rustic, boat-access-only Twitchell Lake cabin, turns 50 this year. But the prolific author, award-winning ecologist, tireless Adirondack advocate and trailblazing feminist has never been the subject of a full biography—until now. Seventh generation Adirondacker Penny Harr corrects that oversight with Anne LaBastille: A Biography of the Woodswoman (North Country Books, 2006), a thorough portrait of this complex and often polarizing figure, compiled from personal interviews and archival research (304 pages, hardcover, $32.95, www.simonandschuster.com).
In Fierce County: The Untold Story of Three Women Who Ignited America’s Love for the Wild (Hanover Square Press, 2026), award-winning writer Heather Hansman also tackles Anne LaBastille’s story, but sets it side-by-side with two other pioneering outdoorswomen, weaving all three adventurous lives into a richer context (300 pages, hardcover, $30.99, www.harpercollins.com).
Terry Hynes didn’t just complete the Fire Tower Challenge—climbing 23 fire tower–crowned summits in the Adirondacks and Catskills—he brings the reader along in Climbing to New Heights: My Journey through the Adirondack Fire Tower Challenge (370 pages, softcover, $32.99, black-and-white photographs, www.amazon.com).
John Brown in New York: The Man, His Family, and the Adirondack Landscape (SUNY Press, 2026), by Sandra Weber, explores how Brown’s Adirondack homestead and his relationships with black neighbors in North Elba helped shape the fiery abolitionist and his family (293 pages, softcover, $32.95, black-and-white photographs and illustrations, sunypress.edu).
Churubusco native Carol Hoenig’s fourth novel, The Liberation of Jane Carter (Sibylline Press, 2026)—which is set among the mines of Lyon Mountain and the farms of Ellenburg—flowed from a tale she heard when she was a child, when her grandmother revealed that she had been forced into marriage with an older man when she was only 16 (221 pages, softcover, $20, shop.sibyllinepress.com).
The Loon Counters (Syracuse University Press, 2026) is a collection of short stories by Roger Sheffer that peeks behind the curtains in the lives of a colorful cast of characters that populate two fictional Adirondack towns (248 pages, softcover, $24.95, press.syr.edu).
Max Victor Alper’s A Nation’s Birth: A Town-by-Town Guide to Colonial and Revolutionary War History in the North (Globe Pequot, 2026) provides the backstory to sites in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York— including Ticonderoga, Johnstown and Saratoga—along with tips for driving or walking tours (442 pages, softcover, $29.95, black-and-white photographs and illustrations, www.simonandschuster.com).
An Old Beauty (Silver Thread Books, 2026), a novel by Richard Figiel set in Saranac Lake, follows a guideboat and the guide who pilots it through the transformative Adirondack history of the 19th and early 20th centuries (180 pages, softcover, $24.95, black-and-white photographs, www.thebookstoreplus.com.
In the foreword to Victoria E. Rinehart’s Portrait of Healing: Curing in the Woods (North Country Books, 2026), cartoonist Garry Trudeau—great-grandson of tuberculosis research and treatment pioneer Edward Livingston Trudeau—remembers the sudden closure of the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium in the 1950s. A photographer from Life magazine who had come to Saranac Lake to document the event exposed his film in an X-ray lab and the moment was lost. “All that remained,” Trudeau writes, “were the tales of the countless consumptives who for 70 years had traveled to this hushed, gentle place to regain their health.” Those tales, along with oral histories from nurses, are compiled in Portrait of Healing, first published in 2002 and now available in a new edition, which retains Garry Trudeau’s original foreword and adds a preface by Amy Catania, executive director of Historic Saranac Lake (192 pages, hardcover, $34.95, black-and-white photographs, www.simonandschuster.com).
The Radiant Dark (SJP Lit, 2026) is a novel about alien contact set in the Adirondacks—where our skies are so dark that touching distant stars seems almost possible—but it is, at its heart, a family drama that keeps its focus grounded on Earth (416 pages, hardcover, $28.95, www.penguinrandomhouse.com).
Rose Knox was a trailblazer, though it took her years to admit it. After her husband, Charles Knox, died in 1908, she quietly took over Charles B. Knox Co., which manufactured an unflavored forerunner of Jello-O in Johnstown. But after publicly taking on the mantle of president in 1914, she grew the operation into a million-dollar company, her innovative housewife-to-housewife marketing turning Knox Gelatine into a household name. Rose Knox: How One Woman Mixed Kitchen and Boardroom to Remold an American Business (Cornell University Press, 2026), by Rachel Greenfield, explores Knox’s remarkable life and gives readers a peek inside her stately Classical Revival mansion in Johnstown—an almost 8,000-square-foot showstopper with a gleaming, state-of-the-art kitchen—as well as her rustic retreat on 35 acres of land in Piseco (304 pages, hardcover, $27.95, black-and-white photographs, cornellpress.cornell.edu).
In Ten Steps from My Door: Adirondack Idyll (Snowy Owl Press, 2026), Caperton Tissot brings the reader on all-season romps through her six-million-acre backyard (150 pages, softcover, $12.99, black-and-white photographs, www.snowyowlpress.com).
