Greenwood: A Novel (Unabridged)
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A magnificent generational saga that charts a family’s rise and fall, its secrets and inherited crimes, from one of Canada’s most acclaimed novelists
Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize • “A rugged, riveting novel . . . This superb family saga will satisfy fans of Richard Powers’s The Overstory.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“There are plenty of visionary moments laced into [Christie’s] shape-shifting narrative. . . . Greenwood penetrates to the core of things.”—The New York Times Book Review
It’s 2038 and Jacinda (Jake) Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide babysitting ultra-rich vacationers in one of the world’s last remaining forests. It’s 2008 and Liam Greenwood is a carpenter, sprawled on his back after a workplace fall, calling out from the concrete floor of an empty mansion. It’s 1974 and Willow Greenwood is out of jail, free after being locked up for one of her endless series of environmental protests: attempts at atonement for the sins of her father’s once vast and violent timber empire. It’s 1934 and Everett Greenwood is alone, as usual, in his maple-syrup camp squat, when he hears the cries of an abandoned infant and gets tangled up in the web of a crime, secrets, and betrayal that will cling to his family for decades.
And throughout, there are trees: a steady, silent pulse thrumming beneath Christie’s effortless sentences, working as a guiding metaphor for withering, weathering, and survival. A shining, intricate clockwork of a novel, Greenwood is a rain-soaked and sun-dappled story of the bonds and breaking points of money and love, wood, and blood—and the hopeful, impossible task of growing toward the light.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Wolves have a reputation for being dangerous, but this tense novel shows that the deadliest creatures of all might just be humans. Inti Flynn and her research team are excited to reintroduce 14 wolves into their natural habitat in the Highlands of Scotland, but many local farmers aren’t so thrilled. Inti has also brought her twin sister, Aggie, along, hoping the change of scenery will help heal some of the emotional scars she incurred back home in Alaska. But when someone turns up dead, Inti makes a desperate move that cranks an already tense situation into overdrive. Veteran narrator Saskia Maarleveld does full justice to Charlotte McConaghy’s poetic descriptions of the wildlife, the locals, and the Scottish wilderness—listening to these passages left us breathless, and we particularly appreciated the in-depth exploration of ecological balance. But above all, we wanted to know: If a wolf wasn’t behind the local murder, then who was? When this spellbinding novel has you in its teeth, it doesn’t let go.
Customer Reviews
Waste of time
Some important eco themes raised, but the characters and plot itself didn’t do much to develop those themes in an interesting or meaningful way.