Michael Finkel Books in Order

Michael Finkel grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, and by his own account he was a restless, curious kid who liked motion. At the University of Pennsylvania he studied finance at Wharton and could easily have taken a business path, but a job at Skiing magazine pulled him somewhere stranger and much more fun.

That first magazine job sent him into mountains, snowfields, and odd corners of the map. He spent much of his twenties traveling with skis, using sport as an excuse to meet people and see how mountain cultures worked in places like Iran, Mongolia, and on Kilimanjaro. Those years fed his first book, Alpine Circus, a lively collection of ski adventures and travel pieces.

He came to writing by following assignments that sounded risky, odd, or impossible to resist.

As a freelance journalist and later a magazine writer, Finkel reported from more than 50 countries. He wrote for major magazines and newspapers, and his stories often landed on people living at the edges of ordinary life: refugees at sea, nomads in Afghanistan, hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, boys lost on the ocean, and a blind man who taught himself echolocation. He never really picked a single beat. Curiosity was the beat.

Then one bad journalistic decision changed everything.

While reporting on child labor in West Africa for The New York Times Magazine, he combined details from several boys into one composite character, a serious breach of reporting standards that cost him his job in 2002. On the very day that became public, he learned that accused murderer Christian Longo had been arrested in Mexico after using Finkel's name and pretending to be a writer for the paper. Finkel wrote to him, a long correspondence followed, and the result was True Story, a book that is part crime reporting and part hard look at the author's own failure. It was later adapted into a 2015 film.

That mix of intimacy and unease became one of Finkel's signatures. Readers tend to come to his books for the outlandish real life premise, then stay for the patient reporting and the way he lets motives stay messy. In Here Be Monsters... 50 Days Adrift At Sea, he follows three teenage boys lost on the ocean. In The Stranger in the Woods, he traces the life of Christopher Knight, who disappeared into the Maine woods and lived alone there for 27 years. The book became a bestseller, and people responded to its mix of survival detail, solitude, and the simple but huge question at its center: why leave the world?

His later book The Art Thief keeps chasing that question from another angle. Instead of isolation, it looks at obsession, following Stéphane Breitwieser, who stole art across Europe not to sell it, but to keep it near him. Finkel spent years trying to win his trust and eventually built the book from long interviews, which helps explain why the story feels less like a case file and more like a close study of compulsion.

His life off the page has changed, too. He married, had three children in quick succession, spent nearly seven years living with his family in the south of France, and later returned to the United States. He now lives with his family in northern Utah. Even with several books behind him, he still tends to describe himself not as a novelist or stylist, but simply as a journalist.