Greenwood

By Michael Christie

Book Overview

A magnificent generational saga that charts a family's rise and fall, its secrets and inherited crimes, and the conflicted relationship with the source of its fortune--trees--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)

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1984822004
• ISBN13: 9781984822000
• Release Date: February 2020
• Publisher: Hogarth Press
• Length: 528 Pages
• Weight: 1.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.3" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Skip or Read?

Skip or Read? There were maybe 5 parts of writing (chapters) that I enjoyed that were legitimately beautiful. But the "family tree" of the Greenwood family felt so forced and unnatural to the characters that I didn't become invested in them or the plot they created. The time jumps didn't seem necessary, almost felt if it was told in time it would have built a better connection to characters. The nature vs nurture argument is not nearly as explored as I expected in a story about family that isn't family. Thought editor would have helped organize this better. Everette and Temple I could have cared about and the end was a slap in the face to characters, nature and reader. Skip...

Thoroughly more enjoyable than The Overstory

Read this book and you will never forget it!