Damnation Spring
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
*'Probably the best novel I'll read this year. It's about work and love and characters who ring true. By the time I was 50 pages in I couldn't put it down. Can't stop thinking about it' Stephen King*
For generations, Rich Gundersen's family has made a living felling giant redwoods on California's rugged coast. It's treacherous work, and though his son, Chub, wants nothing more than to step into his father's boots, Rich longs for a bigger future for him.
Colleen just wants a brother or sister for Chub, but she's losing hope. There is so much that she and Rich don't talk about these days - including her suspicions that there is something very wrong at the heart of the forest on which their community is built.
When Rich is offered the opportunity to buy a plot of timber which borders Damnation Grove, he leaps at the chance - without telling Colleen. Soon the Gundersens find themselves on opposite sides of a battle that threatens to rip their town apart. Can they find a way to emerge from this together?
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Set in the 1970s, Ash Davidson’s gripping novel follows one family’s fight to protect their future and their environment. The coastal California logging town where fourth-generation tree-topper Rich Gundersen and his wife, Colleen, live is facing major changes. While Rich lays down the family’s savings on a swath of ancient redwoods, hoping to make a killing before the industry collapses, Colleen comes to suspect that the multiple miscarriages she and other women have suffered might have been caused by the logging companies’ overuse of herbicides. As Colleen’s investigation butts up against Rich’s get-rich scheme—and their entire community gets drawn into the drama—Davidson explores the conflicts that arise when well-intentioned people have opposing views of what’s best for everyone. Damnation Spring makes us contemplate what’s worth preserving—in nature and in relationships.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Davidson's impressive debut chronicles life in a working-class community so thoroughly that the reader feels the characters' anguish as they're divided over environmental concerns that threaten their lives and livelihoods. The tale unfolds between 1977 and 1978 and follows the Gundersen family: husband and wife Rich and Colleen; and their kindergartner son, Chub. Rich is a fourth-generation logger who dreams of a less financially burdensome future for his family when, without telling Colleen, he plunks down their savings to buy a ridge near their home in Northern California with a harvestable forest of primordial redwoods. Meanwhile Colleen—who has suffered eight miscarriages before and after Chub's birth and who, as the local midwife, has witnessed a disturbing number of defective births—is listening to an environmentalist friend's warning that the defoliants used by the timber company that employs Rich are leaching lethal toxins into the local water supply. Davidson mirrors the tension between Rich and Colleen with empathetic descriptions of the struggles of their neighbors, many of whom cling desperately to their jobs in the face of mounting evidence that their duplicitous employer is poisoning them. The depiction of ordinary people trapped by circumstances beyond their control makes for a heart-wrenching modern American tragedy.
