north woods - by daniel mason

This book must have been my one fascination this summer before I started reading a modern Greek tragedy (Danae, you know which one I mean!). Before I read it myself, I gifted it to a dear friend who is leaving her own footprint on her own house in the woods, and I gifted it to my partner on his birthday. It is not by a female author but I simply had to make this one exception because it is brilliant and because it is about the core, our core, what is believed to be "our original sin". This "sin" in the shape of an apple, threads the beauty of these pages and it will keep you on the edge of your sofa simply reading away till it is done.

North Woods is a novel that traces the layered history of a single house in the New England woods across several centuries. Each chapter acts almost like a self-contained story, yet all are linked by the land, the house, and the echoes of the people who once lived there. Nature itself is a central presence. As human inhabitants come and go, the surrounding forest grows, decays, and transforms, constantly reclaiming and reshaping the land.

It all begins with two young lovers who flee their Puritan community and build a small cabin in the wilderness. Over the decades and centuries that follow, the house becomes home to a rotating cast of occupants: farmers, naturalists, artists, a mother and her troubled son, a researcher studying invasive species, and others. Their hopes, tragedies, secrets, and obsessions accumulate like sediment. The lives of these characters—sometimes ordinary, sometimes dramatic—intersect indirectly through traces they leave behind: diaries, objects, myths, trees, and even ghosts.