Great Reads from Great Places: Adults
Beginning in 2022, the Affiliated Centers for the Book began selecting a “Great Reads from Great Places” adult title as a companion to our books for young readers.
North Woods by Daniel Mason
About the Book
When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to growing apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths an ancient mass grave—only to discover that the earth refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a sinister con man, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle: As the inhabitants confront the wonder and mystery around them, they begin to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.
This magisterial and highly inventive novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason brims with love and madness, humor and hope. Following the cycles of history, nature, and even language, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment, to history, and to one another. It is not just an unforgettable novel about secrets and destinies, but a way of looking at the world that asks the timeless question: How do we live on, even after we’re gone?
Meet the Author
Daniel Mason is a physician and author of The Piano Tuner (2002), A Far Country (2007), The Winter Soldier (2018), A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (2020)—a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—and North Woods (2023). His work has been translated into 28 languages, awarded a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Piano Tuner was produced as an opera by Music Theatre Wales for the Royal Opera House in London, and adapted to the stage by Lifeline Theatre in Chicago. His short stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, Zoetrope: All Story, Zyzzyva, Narrative, and Lapham’s Quarterly, and have been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a National Magazine Award and an O. Henry Prize. An assistant professor in the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry, his research and teaching interests include the subjective experience of mental illness and the influence of literature, history, and culture on the practice of medicine.
Editorial Reviews
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR
A WASHINGTON POST TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD AND THE MARK TWAIN AMERICAN VOICE IN LITERATURE AWARD
“To read it is to travel to the limits of what the novel can do.”—The Guardian
“Gorgeous . . . a tale of ephemerality and succession, of the way time accrues in layers, like sedimentary soil.”—NPR
“Brilliantly combines the granularity of realism with the timeless, shimmering allure of myth . . . The forest and the trees: Mason keeps both in clear view in his eccentric and exhilarating novel.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A time-spanning, genre-blurring work of storytelling magic . . . Each chapter germinates its own form while sending out tendrils that entwine beneath the surface of the novel.”—The Washington Post
“With the expansiveness and immersive feeling of two-time Booker Prize nominee David Mitchell’s fiction (Cloud Atlas), the wicked creepiness of Edgar Allan Poe, and Mason’s bone-deep knowledge of and appreciation for the natural world that’s on par with that of Thoreau, North Woods fires on all cylinders.”—San Francisco Chronicle
More Massachusetts Adult Great Reads
2022
Mercy Street,
by Jennifer Haigh
2023
Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau,
by Ben Shattuck
2024
Rough Sleepers,
by Tracy Kidder