In his deliciously imaginative North Woods, Daniel Mason (A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth; The Piano Tuner) demonstrates that the story of a single plot of land and the people who inhabit it is a tale that's capable of containing multitudes.
Spanning a period from the middle of the 18th century to an indeterminate future when climate change has irrevocably altered the earth, North Woods focuses on a section of several hundred acres in rural Western Massachusetts first cultivated by Charles Osgood, an English veteran of the French and Indian War who believes "God had willed me to raise an orchard"--in his case one that magically springs from a remarkable source. He's a devoted apple farmer, and to house his family he erects a lemon-yellow New England saltbox on the property that becomes the foundational dwelling for those who live on this land over the ensuing centuries.
Beginning with Osgood and his fractious twin daughters, Mary and Alice, who maintain the orchard for more than four decades after their father's death, Mason fashions a parade of intriguing characters (including a handful of ghosts), who experience the full gamut of human life and emotion in this entrancing corner of the world. Near the end of North Woods, a character reflects 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." In this strange, enchanting, and memorable novel, Daniel Mason beautifully allows readers to experience that truth most profoundly. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer