North Woods: A Novel
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Worth: $0.99
(as of Dec 03, 2024 02:33:31 UTC – Particulars)
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 AND THE MARK TWAIN AMERICAN VOICE IN LITERATURE AWARD
A sweeping novel a couple of single home within the woods of New England, instructed by means of the lives of those that inhabit it throughout the centuries—“a time-spanning, genre-blurring work of storytelling magic” (The Washington Publish) from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and writer 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 depraved creepiness of Edgar Allan Poe, and Mason’s bone-deep information of and appreciation for the pure world that’s on par with that of Thoreau, North Woods fires on all cylinders.”—San Francisco Chronicle
New York Instances Guide Assessment Editors’ Alternative A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time, The Boston Globe, NPR, Chicago Public Library, The Star Tribune, The Economist, The Christian Science Monitor, Actual Easy, Kirkus Opinions, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Bookreporter
When two younger lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin within the woods will turn into the house of a rare succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to commit himself to rising apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate conflict and famine, envy and need. A criminal offense reporter reveals an historical mass grave—solely to find that the earth refuse to surrender their secrets and techniques. A lovelorn painter, a sinister con man, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle: Because the inhabitants confront the marvel and thriller round them, they start to comprehend that the darkish, raucous, stunning previous could be very a lot alive.
This magisterial and extremely creative novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason brims with love and insanity, humor and hope. Following the cycles of historical past, nature, and even language, North Woods exhibits the myriad, magical methods during which we’re related to the environment, to historical past, and to 1 one other. It’s not simply an unforgettable novel about secrets and techniques and destinies, however a approach of trying on the world that asks the timeless query: How will we stay on, even after we’re gone?
Prospects say
Prospects discover the storytelling attention-grabbing, wealthy, and engrossing. They respect the poetic writing model and number of writing types. Readers describe the e book as compelling, great, and enjoyable to learn. Additionally they discover the characters wealthy, interesting, and multidimensional. Nonetheless, some discover the plot complicated, tedious, and requires persistence. Moreover, some discover the e book boring and disappointing.
AI-generated from the textual content of buyer evaluations
DJ –
Exposing the seams where our life stories meet
âAnd 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. â¦Papers everywhere, books everywhere, miserable, half-decaying books that heâd 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.â (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 youâll enjoy it; the stories and the writing are excellent. Youâll 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 â and often turns on a dime. There are lots of surprises, cliff-hangers and delicious ambiguities. Itâs quite a collection.But is it a unified, coherent novel? My answer is an emphatic yes â 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 itâs also a story about loss. Sometimes Iâm surprised and frustrated by how much I can no longer remember about my own life. Occasionally, Iâm even startled to discover some objective piece of evidence that contradicts what I thought I remembered clearly. If we canât even remember our own lives, what will it take to make sense of our shared history?
Sean Flynn –
Beautifully Written but Needs a Ghostbuster
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.
Kindle Customer –
an entertaining story.
Intertwined with a historical novel and the supernatural. It will keep you engaged and turning the page to see what and who will come upon the apple orchard and legacy of the Osgood family.
DSA –
Interesting characters, but the plot veered too far off course for me toward the end
The premise of this novel hooked me right away: it tells the story of the people who lived in a small cabin in the North Woods over a span of several hundred years. This book started off strong with well-developed, interesting characters and a unifying thread linking their stories across generations. However, the plot became confusing and hard to follow about halfway through. The ending did bring some clarity, but not enough for me.
MIhistorian –
Even better than the hype
It’s utterly impossible to do this book justice. I’m shaking from the experience of reading it, awestruck by Mason’s genius and nerve. This is romp through the genres of American literature and tribute to all of them. It is a love letter to trees and birds, and a lament. But ultimately it rejects dystopian moping and tells a tale not of loss but of change — and of persistence. Easily the best novel I’ve read in years. Maybe since Byatt’s Possession.
Lorena –
Que los bosques nos sean eternos.
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, itâs really the cabinâs story, as it is the leading character throughout. As you read on, Mason slowly reveals the connections that arenât so readily seen. But once you start to become aware of them, thatâs 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!
LJ –
My sister in law recommended. And so glad she did. Highly recommend.
Peter Engler –
Sehr spannend geschrieben!
Ruth –
I can’t put this book down. It has an odd start which made me wonder if I wanted to persevere with it, but it’s definitely worth reading on because I am now loving it. Lots of stories about the same space in a wood, loosely related as they span several centuries. Magical and engrossinh.