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Greenwood: A Novel
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.
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Community Reviews
Beautiful, and ugly, fractured family saga. The Greenwood brothers, Harris and Everett, were orphans fending for themselves in the forest near town, and trees defined and shaped their whole existence, but in such different ways.
I was lent this book by my colleague who has a similar taste in books and whose recommendations are usually reliable.
I was aware the book moved around from one time period to another and whilst in principle I enjoy this I need the book to be well-written to support the mental gymnastics that it requires.
From the outset I was hooked and the deeper into the novel I got the more exquisite I found it. Michael Christie has created a set of characters with such depth that I truly felt like I was living their lives with them. The writing was quite simply flawless - elegant, intelligent, touching, raw, painful and honest... I couldn't get enough of it.
I loved the way it started in the future and gradually wound its way back and then proceeded to travel the other way back to the future again.
The story wound characters and their experiences with trees - and what human beings do with and to trees -
seamlessly together to create an arboreal narrative that made the novel all the more sumptuous.
For me tho', the highlight of the book was the tale of human resilience that gave the characters something truly special. The story of Everett Greenwood and how his life touched and was touched by the other characters in the book was spellbinding and he will always have place in my heart.
An exceptional novel, one of the easiest 10/10 I've ever given
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