Jonna Bragg

Jonna Bragg is an award-winning American novelist whose writing is shaped by the quiet truths of everyday life and the enduring relationship between people and the landscapes they inhabit. Her work is known for its quiet intensity, moral clarity, and deep attention to the inner lives of ordinary people facing extraordinary change.

She is the author of three novels that span literary fiction, mystery, and thriller. Her novel Exit 8 won the 2019 BookLife Prize from Publishers Weekly. Set in rural Vermont. the novel follows Roland Tuttle, a bachelor farmer whose ancestral land and way of life stand in the path of the construction of the Interstate Highway System. Through the history of one family and one farm, Exit 8 examines personal choice, loss, and the often unseen human cost of progress.

Her thriller, The Broom of God, is set in the remote wilderness of Chilean Patagonia. When a world-famous mountaineer is found murdered in basecamp near an unexplored mountain range on the edge of the Patagonian Icecap, an investigator from Santiago is drawn into a case shaped by brutal terrain, political violence, and the dark secrets of an isolated village. The novel is both a gripping mystery and a meditation on obsession, power, and the unforgiving beauty of extreme landscapes.

Her most recent novel, Hemlock Flat, is a dark mystery set during a record-breaking heat wave in a small New Hampshire hill town. When a teenage girl disappears and a prized Highland cow is found savaged by an unknown predator, long-buried family histories and unspoken fears rise to the surface. The novel blends psychological suspense, rural noir, and literary depth, exploring memory, guilt, and the pull of home.

Bragg is a world-renowned climber and mountaineer, and her lifelong engagement with wild places deeply informs her writing. She brings an intimate understanding of risk, endurance, solitude, and physical labor to her stories, qualities that give her work its distinctive sense of authenticity and restraint. Over the years, she has worked more jobs than she can remember, experiences that continue to shape her grounded, observant approach to character and story.

She lives and writes in midcoast Maine, where she also does carpentry. Her work will resonate with readers of literary fiction, atmospheric mysteries, and wilderness thrillers, especially those drawn to stories rooted in place, moral complexity, and the enduring tension between tradition and change.