#BookReview North Woods by Daniel Mason @johnmurrays

About the Book

FOUR CENTURIES. A SINGLE HOUSE DEEP IN THE WOODS OF NEW ENGLAND.

A young Puritan couple on the run. An English soldier with a fantastic vision. Inseparable twin sisters. A lovelorn painter and a lusty beetle. A desperate mother and her haunted son. A ruthless con man and a stalking panther. Buried secrets. Madness, dreams and hope.

All are connected. The dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.

Format: eARC (384 pages) Publisher: John Murray Press
Publication date: 19th September 2023 Genre: Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

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My Review

I loved the first book by Daniel Mason I read, The Winter Soldier, an emotional and beautifully written novel set in the First World War that I had no hesitation in awarding five stars. The same was true of his next book, A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth, a collection of short stories whose subtle links and recurring themes become more apparent as you read the book. In my review, I described it as ‘a tour de force of imagination’ and I have no hesitation in applying the same description to North Woods.

Starting in the 17th century and centred around a remote house and the surrounding north woods, events unfold in a series of episodes told in a variety of styles including a testimony, a newspaper report, a lecture, an exchange of correspondence, a poem, a song. Over time, the house is a place of passion, violence, refuge, contentment, simmering resentment, mental distress and trickery. It’s extended, damaged by storms, left to become derelict, abandoned and then rediscovered. The people that have inhabited it have each left a mark on it, sometimes incorporeal in nature, adding an intriguing supernatural element.

The connections the author weaves between the episodes and the various characters are immensely clever and skilfully done. Some of the links are obvious, some less so, meaning it might only be the mention of an object – an old hat of felted beaver – or a name – Osgood – that makes you recall an earlier story. The book is akin to a patchwork quilt made up of squares created by people of different generations and different skill levels, sewn together in random fashion but with some recurring motifs. As I was reading the book, my constant thought was ‘this is my favourite’, only for it to be replaced by another almost immediately afterwards.

The events in the lives of the characters are often intensely moving but there are also elements of humour, eccentricity and melodrama. And the book doesn’t just feature human characters but also animal and insect life – that ‘lusty beetle’ mentioned in the blurb – even fungal diseases.

The writing is beautiful with the author adopting a variety of styles that wonderfully bring to life the events of each episode. I’m a great fan of a list and there are some brilliantly quirky ones in the book, often almost poetic in style, such as this description of the items making up the ballast of a ship bound for America, demonstrating it’s not only humans who migrate.

‘There are stones and loam and sand, insects and earthworms, bird bones and crushed snail shells, roly-polies, and tuffs of grass that wilt within the darkness of the hold. There is a half-decayed mole, and a live one, broken jugs, a Roman coin that will be rediscovered by a young boy walking on the shoreline 317 years later, and another, a “crown of the double rose” bearing an image of Edward VI on horseback, that will sift down into the silty depths of Massachusetts Bay and disappear forever. There is a beaded necklace dropped by a longshoreman’s wife during a moment of indiscretion, a splintered lens from a bookkeeper’s spectacles, stray curls blown from the barber’s market stall by an offshore breeze, peach pits, rotting broadsheets of forgotten songs. And there are seeds, uncountable, scattered in the humid load: red clover, groundsel, spurrey, trefoil, meadow fescue, dandelion, hedge parsley, nonesuch, plantains.’

The depiction of nature is mesmerising charting the changing of the seasons and the transformation of the woods over time. In fact, the woods are a character in themselves acting amongst other things as a sanctuary, a meeting place, a source of inspiration, a habitation, a hiding place and a harbinger of environmental change.

I thought North Woods was absolutely brilliant. It’s definitely one of the best books I’ve read this year.

I received a digital review copy courtesy of John Murray Press via NetGalley.

In three words: Magical, imaginative, moving

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About the Author

Daniel Mason is the author of The Piano Tuner (2002), A Far Country (2007), The Winter Soldier  (2018), A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (2020), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.  His work has been translated into 28 languages, adapted for opera and stage, and awarded a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.  His short stories and essays have been awarded two Pushcart Prizes, a National Magazine Award, and an O. Henry Prize. He is an assistant professor in the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry. (Photo: Goodreads author page)

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