Greenwood: A Novel

One of Canada’s most acclaimed novelists has written a magnificent generational saga that charts a family’s rise and fall, its secrets and inherited crimes. Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, it is a rugged, riveting novel that will satisfy fans of Richard Powers’s The Overstory, according to Publishers Weekly (starred review). The New York Times Book Review notes that there are plenty of visionary moments laced into the shape-shifting narrative, and Greenwood penetrates to the core of things.

In 2038, 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. In 2008, Liam Greenwood is a carpenter, sprawled on his back after a workplace fall, calling out from the concrete floor of an empty mansion. In 1974, Willow Greenwood is out of jail, free after being locked up for one of her endless series of environmental protests. These are her attempts at atonement for the sins of her father’s once vast and violent timber empire. In 1934, 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. 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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