Daniel Mason

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 daring, moving tale of memory and fate from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier. When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become home to an extraordinary succession of inhabitants. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins survive war and famine, only to succumb to envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths a mass grave, but finds the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle: as each one confronts the mysteries of the north woods, they come to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive. Traversing cycles of history, nature, and even literature, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment and to one another, across time, language and space. Written along with the seasons and divided into the twelve months of the year, it is an unforgettable novel about secrets and fates that asks the timeless question: how do we live on, even after we’re gone?

A Novel

North Woods

Brandon Eckroth

History haunts him who does not honour it.

taylor miles hopkins

ella

Let me put it another way: The dead do not go away. The world teems with their spirits: a thousand angels on a blade of grass.

Sometimes, overwhelmed, she retreats into the forests of the past. She has come to think of them as her private Archive, herself as Archivist, and she has found that the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change. During her life, she'd dreamed about these ancient forests, but what she finds is glorious beyond imagination. Skies blackened by bird flocks, valleys full of grazing moose and elk. The glens echo with the songs of long-lost warblers (and by now, she's learned them), children singing in Mohican, wolf howl. Rivers so thick with fish that she could walk on them. The ghosts of the damselflies, dryad's saddle, elm trees: a thousand angels on a blade of grass.

Vera bee

she has found that the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.

Placing a stone in the forks of a tree branch is a child's charm: it should not be practiced systematically. Like all charms, it will lose its Magic when it becomes a Method.

…felt a kinship with someone who had learned to untether part of himself and let it roam, while the rest of him was bound by circumstance. 

Can there be art without the human in it?

It was as if the past were written everywhere upon the land.

Witness trees, she'd tell them. An old term of trade for trees that marked invisible boundaries. Now also used for those that were present at Important moments in our history. In other words: the ones that witnessed us.

North Woods quotes

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