North Woods

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing for the ARC of this book I exchange for an honest review.

This strange novel has entered the ranks to be one of my top books of the year.

North Woods, by Daniel Mason is a slow burning, haunting, non-plot-driven, non-linear novel containing some of the most beautiful nature writing I have read in a long time.

The book follows a plot of land in New England through time, in a sequence of increasingly-connected vignettes. A variety of characters, some likeable and some hate-able, live on or pass through this land, ranging from puritans, to a psychic, a beetle (yes the insect), an apple farmer, a lobotomist, a botanist, etc. All of their stories are simultaneously mundane and fascinating, and they all weave together with details and traces connecting one story to the next. There are so many subtle links between them that I am sure this book would stand up to rereading.

The forest and land that each of these stories take place on is a crucial part of the story, and the nature writing describing it is vivid and magical.

One of the most unique novels I have read in a while, I highly recommend this book!