Greenwood
A Novel
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- 85,00 kr
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
This multigenerational work of eco-fiction ponders…if a family tree falls in the last forest left on Earth, does it make a sound? In 2038, orphan Jacinda “Jake” Greenwood gives nature tours on the precious Greenwood Island—but she assumes that the name she shares with the uniquely wooded place is just a coincidence. That is, until a chance encounter causes her to wonder if she might in fact have a familial claim to the land. Michael Christie tells the twisty tale of Jake’s family, jumping to 2008, 1974, 1934, and 1908, teasing out fascinating details of the Greenwood clan along the way. Christie gives each era a unique feel, making everyone we meet on the journey seem distinct and fully realized. Between the rich family tapestry it weaves and its starkly relevant themes about our environmental future, Greenwood is impossible to put down.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Christie's rugged, riveting novel (after If I Fall, If I Die) entwines a family's rising and falling fortunes with Canada's dwindling old-growth forests. In a frightening, nearly treeless 2038, 33-year-old dendrologist Jacinda "Jake" Greenwood guides tourists on a British Columbia island where a rare forest withstood the global environmental disaster and ensuing economic collapse known as the Great Withering. While Jake worries about spots appearing on two fir trees, her ex-fianc , Silas, now a lawyer, informs her she could inherit a large sum from the Greenwood estate. Orphaned at age eight, Jake knows little about her family, and the more she learns through reading her grandmother's journal, the less she wants the money. Her father, Liam, was a carpenter and gifted woodworker. Liam's mother, Willow, was the ecoterrorist daughter of lumber tycoon Harris Greenwood. Willow, though, was not Harris's biological daughter. Abandoned as a baby, she was rescued by Harris's brother Everett and entrusted to Harris for safekeeping. Nor were Harris and Everett biological brothers; they were survivors of a train wreck who were raised together by a lumberjack's widow and given the name Greenwood. Christie recounts each generation's story through concentric flashbacks in which families, like forests, experience both devastation and renewal, anchored in Jake's recognition that she'd rather inherit the earth than a fortune derived from its destruction. This superb family saga will satisfy fans of Richard Powers's The Overstory while offering a convincing vision of potential ecological destruction.
