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Amazon.com: North Woods: A Novel (Audible Audio Edition): Daniel Mason, Mark Bramhall, Michael Crouch, Jason Culp, Mark Deakins, Jayne Entwistle, Billie Fulford-Brown, Arthur…
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR
A WASHINGTON POST TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries—“a time-spanning, genre-blurring work of storytelling magic” (The Washington Post) from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier.
“With the expansiveness and immersive feeling of two-time Booker Prize nominee David Mitchell’s fiction (Cloud Atlas), the wicked creepiness of Edgar Allan Poe, and Mason’s bone-deep knowledge of and appreciation for the natural world that’s on par with that of Thoreau, North Woods fires on all cylinders.”—San Francisco Chronicle
New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time, The Boston Globe, NPR, Chicago Public Library, The Star Tribune, The Economist, The Christian Science Monitor, Real Simple, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Bookreporter
When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to growing apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths an ancient mass grave—only to discover that the earth refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a sinister con man, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle: As the inhabitants confront the wonder and mystery around them, they begin to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.
This magisterial and highly inventive novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason brims with love and madness, humor and hope. Following the cycles of history, nature, and even language, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment, to history, and to one another. It is not just an unforgettable novel about secrets and destinies, but a way of looking at the world that asks the timeless question: How do we live on, even after we’re gone?
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Amazon.com: North Woods: A Novel (Audible Audio Edition): Daniel Mason, Mark Bramhall, Michael Crouch, Jason Culp, Mark Deakins, Jayne Entwistle, Billie Fulford-Brown, Arthur…
Dr. Alexander Laub –
Reizend wird die Geschichte der Bewohner einer Hütte/ eines Hauses in einem schönen Wald erzählt, durch die Jahrhunderte seit der Zeit der ersten weißen Siedler in Amerika hindurch. Dort wachsen die köstlichsten Äpfel, ein Maler findet Zuflucht, ein Industrieller möchte dort jagen, ein Bewohner ist paranoid erkrankt. Das Geschichtspanorama im Kleinen findet seine Entsprechung in detaillierten botanischen sowie medizinischen Darstellungen.
DJ –
“And everywhere was junk… She was struck by the discrepancy in meaning the belongings presented. That death meant not only the cessation of a life, but vast worlds of significance. …Papers everywhere, books everywhere, miserable, half-decaying books that he’d collected from yard sales, old National Geographics, Life magazines. Stacks of phone books, broken along their spines and filled with newspaper clippings, weather forecasts, sports scores, obituaries, the names all unfamiliar. No rhyme or reason she could ascertain. Sound and fury, she thought, signifying nothing. Or signifying something, but something lost.” (p293-4)
The protagonist here is a small, remote piece of land in Massachusetts. The book is the (fictional) history of this land from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. Early on, it feels like a collection of loosely connected short stories that share a common location. And you’ll enjoy it; the stories and the writing are excellent. You’ll read about murders, sex, ghosts, slavery, war, mental illness, incarceration, and the natural world. The tone ranges from spooky to funny, horrific to poignant, shocking to bucolic – and often turns on a dime. There are lots of surprises, cliff-hangers and delicious ambiguities. It’s quite a collection.
But is it a unified, coherent novel? My answer is an emphatic yes – though it took me a while to see it. As the tale unfolds, Mason connects the stories beautifully. He writes of small things that become important down the road, and seemingly large matters that shrink to oblivion. He tricks us into asking whether life and death are large matters or small. What sets this novel apart, however, is the way Mason exposes the seams where the stories meet, inviting us to ponder how much of our shared history we lose, forget, bury, misrepresent, or misunderstand.
So this is a book about fragility and mortality: the long sweep of history compared to our brief lifespans; the chance events that change things forever; our relationship to those who came before us and those who will come after; our dependence and effect on the planet itself. But it’s also a story about loss. Sometimes I’m surprised and frustrated by how much I can no longer remember about my own life. Occasionally, I’m even startled to discover some objective piece of evidence that contradicts what I thought I remembered clearly. If we can’t even remember our own lives, what will it take to make sense of our shared history?
Lorena –
Que los bosques nos sean eternos.
J. Brennan –
This is a wonderful, beautifully written and enriching piece. Spanning centuries, times in the lives of several characters are evoked and the reader is engaged and moved by them all. It’s one of those books that, coming to the last page, you’d like to begin again.
Sunblock 40 –
Loved this beautifully-written novel that weaves together over the years the stories of a number of people who inhabited a certain cabin in the woods. In a way, it’s really the cabin’s story, as it is the leading character throughout. As you read on, Mason slowly reveals the connections that aren’t so readily seen. But once you start to become aware of them, that’s when another layer of magic kicks in. Mason does this with the same talent of Barbara Kingsolver in The Poisonwood Bible, but this book feels a little more accessible, if only because its tales are more concise. Buy it. Read it. Love it. Pass it on!
Sean Flynn –
North Woods reminds me a lot of my first read for this year — the graphic novel Here by Richard McGuire. Both narratives examine the progression of time across a single space, including the lives of the people who come to occupy that space. Here, however, takes a very rigid pov, never varying from its single, immobile lens as if an eternal camera had been planted on a tripod and took a photograph at random moments across the span of tens of thousands of years. North Woods is considerably more intimate, detailing the events around a single cabin across four centuries and over several acres in the woodlands of northern Massachusetts. As is to be expected, we encounter multiple narratives within the novel’s 369 pages, and not just human ones. In fact, what makes North Woods exceptional is how well Daniel Mason characterizes everything within his setting so that we come away from it feeling just as connected (if not more so) to the cabin and its environs as we do the characters who come into contact with them.
The novel is structured like a series of short stories (one for roughly each month of the year), beginning with a colonial couple who settle in the area after fleeing their puritanical elders to avoid an arranged marriage, then moving, like the passing of the deed, from one owner (and occasional visitor) to the next. Interspersed between these narratives are photographs, drawings, excerpts from a Farmer’s Almanac, property listings, and intermittently (seemingly to denote longer passages of time) lyrics to various folk ballads. Even though each occupant’s story is relatively brief, Mason uses all of his authorial prowess to give them flesh and blood. There isn’t one of them whose wants and fears, hopes, dreams, and dreads that we feel aren’t naturally disclosed, all the while masterfully employing language that is reminiscent of each period.
Even more impressive is how beautifully and exactingly Mason writes of his setting. As the stories move through their months, we are treated to some of the most lush and detailed descriptions of the woods surrounding the cabin (as well as the changes happening to the cabin itself). Turning these pages is as close to a literal walk through these north woods as you’re likely to take, if you were take a walk in them once a month for a year with the purpose of examining the subtle changes in flora and fauna happening around you. But perhaps what is most remarkable is that these descriptions don’t just come in large chunks that take readers out of the narrative as we work to plow through them. They are intricately and organically blended into each story, woven into the experiences of the characters as the characters experience their surroundings, creating this sense that we are as much bound by time and place as the beetles and dragonflies, owls and squirrels, beeches and chestnuts.
To take matters even further, Mason supplies a thematic counterbalance to this sense of a moment within a moment. He tells us of a certain parasitic spore, for example, whose life cycle depends entirely on chance. It is swept up from its host tree in a gust of wind, is carried into the sky, descends in a raindrop, gets into the fur of a dog who shakes it loose back into the air where it lands on the branch of a chestnut in a spot that had been damaged by the fall of a beech limb. Having landed right in this specific spot, the spore is able to infiltrate the chestnut’s defenses, proliferate within, and go on to blight countless other chestnut trees for miles around. Compare this to the apple seed in the stomach of a poisoned Englishman that sprouts into a lucrative orchard many years later. Or the Bible scooped up from the cabin by a runaway slave passing through on her flight to Canada, whose marginal notes are passed from generation to generation until the story they tell are ultimately brought to light. If our corporeal selves exist for only a moment, Mason seems to argue, the smallest, most insignificant of our actions within this moment can have effects that reach far beyond our finite capacity to know them.
Unless, of course, we’re able to survive our physical existence. And this is where North Woods loses a star from me, surprisingly enough. I had come to this novel entirely aware that it portrayed elements of the supernatural. In fact, it was the review in The New York Times that described North Woods as a kind of biography of a haunted house that made me want to read it! But I was expecting the hauntings to be much more subtle than they are, and I think the novel would be masterclass if they were (or if they were just removed entirely). I like the idea of energies from the past subsisting across time — like maybe the scent of a long-gone owner being caught briefly in the breeze stirred in an empty room. What we’re actually given, though, are things like a ghost from the 1700’s materializing during a seance in the early 1900’s and asking, “What have you done to my apple trees?” Seriously bro? You’ve been a conscious being for about 120 years after you’ve died, and you’re still upset about your trees? Like … you don’t have bigger problems? It’s almost comical how these spirits appear to some of these characters being still the same people they were when they were alive. I mean, I’ve only been conscious for 50 years (except when I’ve been asleep, which totals to about 30 years — counting naps), and I’ve probably undergone at least seven total-personality overhauls. It’s really quite a shame that an author who’s so good at writing about natural things decided to add the supernatural into it. The two don’t really seem to mix here, in glaringly noticeable ways.
And maybe that’s the point? Maybe Mason is arguing that the natural is natural and the supernatural is not, and here’s his story to prove it. If so … that’s a weird flex, and I’m pretty sure that wasn’t his intent. However, that doesn’t mean this book shouldn’t be experienced for everything else it has going right with it. Overall, North Woods is an immeasurably beautiful exploration of the inevitability of change, the cyclical nature of time, the persistence of memory, and a treatise on how big things can sprout from small seeds.
Just needs a Ghostbuster.
Just one.
CHARVOLEN A. –
Nature and time melt into in a soft continuum involving a variety of souls.