Greenwood
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- £11.99
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
‘The truth is that all family lines, from the highest to the lowest, originate somewhere, on some particular day. Even the grandest trees must’ve once been seeds spun helpless on the wind, and then just meek saplings nosing up from the soil.’
2034. On a remote island off the Pacific coast of British Columbia stands the Greenwood Arboreal Cathedral, one of the world’s last forests. Wealthy tourists flock from all corners of the dust-choked globe to see the spectacle and remember what once was. But even as they breathe in the fresh air and pose for photographs amidst the greenery, ranger Jake knows that the forest is dying, though her bosses won’t admit it.
1908. Two passenger locomotives meet head-on. The only survivors are two young boys, who take refuge in a trapper’s cabin in a forest on the edge of town. In fourteen years, one of them, now a recluse, will find an abandoned baby in that same forest — another child of Greenwood — setting off a series of events that will change the course of his life, and the lives of those around him.
Structured like the rings of a tree, this remarkable novel moves from the future to the present to the past, and back again, to tell the story of one family and their enduring connection to the place that brought them together.
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.
