North Woods
About
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 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?
Unchaptered
p. 39
History haunts him who does not honour it.
p. 42
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.
p. 138
Woods, from the Old English wode… also meaning “mad.”
p. 144
…the sense of oneness with the world—of dissolving away. Now I wonder if this is what I seek when I paint—a disappearance into.
p. 182
She took on any client as long as they could pay; she was American… she made no promises unless in astral currency, redeemable in the beyond.
p. 186
“It is a well-accepted fact that, even in the firmest substances, the atoms do not touch. There is ample space for other worlds.”
p. 191
…the story that she had settled upon over the years was that which, frankly, enabled what seemed to be the best compromise of narrative possibility and restraint.
p. 245
Just as they knew that, if one was simply patient, a friend’s true essence would emerge in time.
p. 267
Man’s a product of his environment, and that’s true for the upright and the sickos alike.
p. 293
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. A candle that might once have provided comfort in the winter darkness, a shawl gifted by an erstwhile suitor, a pheasant that recalled her poor lost grandfather. Old brass, old rag, old bird.
p. 314
There are “amateur musicians” an “amateur artists,” but such descriptors are borne with pride and affection, for they suggest a kind of devotion unsullied by the marketplace (amateur, from the French for “one who loves”).
p. 323
…he’s gone prospecting on far more tenuous leads than this one, and if most of them led nowhere, it didn’t really matter. Because they often led somewhere else. He’d be a fool not to embrace a lovely spring day, with the whole world to himself.
p. 349
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.
p. 350
Between 1970 and 2019 alone, nearly a third of all birds had disappeared from North America.
p. 366
No email; along with immortality, metempsychosis, the taste of mushrooms once poisonous to life, it is one of death’s great virtues.
Nothing is more likely to make me abandon something than to be told to do it…
My sole consolation—and it is a great one—is the realization of my life’s fortune in your friendship. For it is Fortune. To think of all that had to happen so that we might meet, and all that might have happened to prevent it…
Highlights
Nothing is more likely to make me abandon something than to be told to do it…
…this is the kind of straightjacket that I worry most about. It isn’t praise, it is a command. When they compliment the cook on his potatoes, it’s just an order to cook the same thing again.