North Woods
By Daniel Mason
- Genre
- Literary Fiction
- Publisher
- Random House (Penguin Random House)
- Publication year
- 2023
- ISBN
- 9780593597033
North Woods traces the inhabitants of a single house in the woods of western Massachusetts across several centuries, from colonial settlers to the present. Daniel Mason links its many residents, lovers, an apple grower, twin sisters, a painter, assorted ghosts, through the land they share...
A single house in the western Massachusetts woods is the true protagonist of Daniel Mason's beguiling novel, which passes from tenant to tenant across some four centuries. 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. Erudite, funny and haunted, it makes a persuasive case that a place remembers, and that we are all, briefly, its guests.