North Woods

Settlers, an apple obsessive, warring sisters, a painter, assorted ghosts: each inhabits the same rooms and ground, and Mason renders their episodes in a delighted variety of forms - ballads, letters, medical notes, true-crime pastiche. The effect is a nature poem in the shape of a novel, attentive to beetles and blight and the slow violence of seasons, and quietly radical in decentering the human.

Time is the great subject; lives that feel urgent to those living them dissolve into soil and story, yet nothing is quite lost, as figures linger and recur. Readers open to structural play will find the book both formally exhilarating and unexpectedly tender.