Greenwood Novel

One of Canada’s most acclaimed novelists presents a magnificent generational saga that charts a family’s rise and fall, its secrets and inherited crimes. Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Greenwood is a rugged, riveting novel that will satisfy fans of Richard Powers’s The Overstory, according to a starred review in Publishers Weekly.

The story spans different time periods, beginning in 2038, with Jacinda (Jake) Greenwood working as a storyteller and a liar, guiding ultra-rich vacationers in one of the world’s last remaining forests. In 2008, her father, Liam Greenwood, is a carpenter who suffers a workplace fall and is left sprawled on his back in an empty mansion. In 1974, her mother, Willow Greenwood, is released from jail after a series of environmental protests, attempting to atone for her father’s once vast and violent timber empire. Finally, in 1934, Everett Greenwood rescues an abandoned infant and becomes entangled in a web of crime, secrets, and betrayal that haunts the family for decades.

Throughout the narrative, trees serve as a guiding metaphor for survival, with a steady, silent pulse throbbing beneath the effortless sentences. The novel delves into the bonds and breaking points of money and love, wood and blood, and the hopeful but impossible task of growing toward the light. The New York Times Book Review praises the novel for its visionary moments, stating that Greenwood penetrates to the core of things.

Greenwood is a shining, intricate clockwork of a novel, offering a rain-soaked and sun-dappled tale that spans generations. It’s a story of withering, weathering, and surviving, expertly crafted by the author.

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