Wish You Well

Wish You Well is a novel by the American writer David Baldacci, first published in 2001 and a departure from the thrillers he is best known for.

The Cardinal family is on the road in the 1940s, thinking about moving west, when a crash kills the father and leaves the mother in a state where she cannot care for her children. Twelve-year-old Louisa Mae and her younger brother Oz are taken in by their great-grandmother on a farm in the Virginia mountains, and the novel follows the two of them as they learn the work of the place, make friends among the neighbours and come up against the companies that want the mineral rights under the land. The book is written as a coming-of-age story about a girl who has to grow up quickly and about the community that absorbs her, and Baldacci later adapted it for a film released in 2013.

It was a departure from the thrillers he had been writing up to that point, and readers who knew only those books found a different writer in it.