Greenwood: A Novel by Michael Christie

Greenwood: A Novel by Michael ChristieGreenwood: A Novel by Michael Christie A 2023 CANADA READS FINALIST INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER, LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE, SHORTLISTED FOR THE FOREST OF READING'S EVERGREEN AWARD, THE ETHEL WILSON FICTION PRIZE, AND THE RODERICK HAIG BROWN REGIONAL PRIZE, AND WINNER OF THE ARTHUR ELLIS AWARD AND LE PRIX DU LIVRE DE SQY A magnificent generational saga that charts a family's rise and fall, its secrets and inherited crimes, and the

Greenwood: A Novel by Michael Christie

A 2023 CANADA READS FINALIST

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER, LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE, SHORTLISTED FOR THE FOREST OF READING'S EVERGREEN AWARD, THE ETHEL WILSON FICTION PRIZE, AND THE RODERICK HAIG-BROWN REGIONAL PRIZE, AND WINNER OF THE ARTHUR ELLIS AWARD AND LE PRIX DU LIVRE DE SQY

A magnificent generational saga that charts a family's rise and fall, its secrets and inherited crimes, and the conflicted relationship with the source of its fortune--trees.

They come for the trees. It's 2038 and Jacinda (Jake) Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide babysitting ultra-rich-eco-tourists 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 and facing the possibility of his own death. It's 1974 and Willow Greenwood is just out of jail for one of her environmental protests: attempts at atonement for the sins of her father's once vast and rapacious timber empire. It's 1934 and Everett Greenwood is a Depression-era drifter who saves an abandoned infant, only to find himself 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.

Transporting, beautifully written, and brilliantly structured like the nested growth rings of a tree, Greenwood reveals the knot of lies, omissions, and half-truths that exists at the root of every family's origin story. It is a magnificent novel of greed, sacrifice, love, and the ties that bind--and the hopeful, impossible task of growing toward the light.