This is the story of a tract of land, its evolution over time, and the people who lived on it and made it their home. In "North Woods", the ghosts are very real, and haunt the present with an active hand.

Sometimes the stories were too short. I wanted to know many of the characters better, and as the book came to a close, time seemed to accelerate, leaving some of them half-known and lightly sketched.

This is a book for anyone who has felt a deep connection with a place and for all of us with a commitment to saving the wild places for the future.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing for my free gifted copy of Daniel Mason’s newest book North Woods. In exchange I offer my unbiased opinion.

Trust me, this book will be on all the award lists and best of 2023 lists for its gorgeous writing and imaginative and unique storytelling. North Woods is about the land, its cabin and those who inhabit the property over the course of hundreds of years. Told as vignettes we read the connections we make to the past, present and future. My favorite reads are interconnected stories and this book was truly masterclass.

If you’re looking for a fall book to transport you to another time, place and way of life look no further.
Book publishes today, September 19, 2023. Don’t miss out!

In the first story in North Woods, Daniel Mason’s beautifully written love story for the land, we meet a rebellious young couple escaping from their restrictive Puritan village. They seek refuge in the Massachusetts woods, where they build a cabin to shelter them. The book then follows the story of that cabin, the surrounding land, and the series of people who come to inhabit it through the years and the adventures they encounter. North Woods is a history, a character study, and a plea for responsible stewardship of the land. It is unusual in its structure and content. Not my usual reading, but beautiful prose from a Pulitzer Prize winner. I thank NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy for review.

The North Woods by Daniel Mason is beautiful, lyrical reflection on the power and mystery of place. In a series of connected short stories, Mason explores the people who have made a place their home and, in doing so, reminds us that we live with history and those that came before us are present in the spaces where we live. This book will stay with me for a long time!

My thanks to NetGalley for the e-ARC. All opinions expressed are my own.

What an interesting book. I wasn’t sure what to expect but it was unique in so many ways. The main character is a home in western MA and the plot revolves around the many owners of the home through the centuries. The writing is just beautiful and the details of the flora and fauna provide a rich background. The book is broken up into many short stories, revealing the owners and visitors over the years. Some of these are particularly memorable and intertwined but some seemed to churn along slowly. Add in some ghosts, magic, murders and poetry and it became a bit too baffling. I know Mason is a celebrated and talented writer, but this book just didn’t connect for me.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for this advance reader copy, in exchange for an honest review. North Woods is a story about history— specifically the history of a particular patch of land in New England and its many inhabitants over the years, ranging from Puritan times to murder and mystical animals.

This story was such a beautiful, lyrical collection of stories about the nature around us that we often take for granted. The story itself doesn’t have a propulsive plot but, rather it seems like the land is the plot and the main character, all wrapped in one, with the human characters taking second stage. The story touches on many sensitive subjects and weaves them in seamlessly to the larger book. It does take some investment to get into the book, as it is a bit of a slow start; but it is definitely worth the effort! Mason’s writing is beautiful and the structure is unique, I’m sure it will stick with me for some time to come.

I’d recommend this book to fellow readers and literary fiction fans!

Thank you to net galley for giving me an e-arc of North Woods by Daniel Mason. It is very rare indeed that a novel of this caliber is written. The language beautifully poetic and rich with imagery. It felt entirely like something written out of time. This will be a story I revisit throughout the years. Best read all year.

Gorgeous writing - stunning writing - about connections spanning hundreds of years in a house in the north woods. Have you ever take a tour through an old house or even been in a truly OLD house and said - “if these walls could talk…” (imagine the stories they could tell). This book does just that. Connection to each other, a community, and the land and the house - all described in a way that was complex and almost ethereal in the way it captured my spirit. Thanks to the publisher for gifting me a copy.

All homes have histories, and North Woods tells the story of one of them through the lives of the people that called it home spanning hundreds of years.

Honestly, I don’t think you need to know much else than that. Maybe it’s important to know this book has no true plot, and yet, each resident stands out for their own reason - there’s murder, there’s a seance, there’s a stalking animal… and yet the point of all of this is each residents connection to the earth, to the house itself, and how the outside world perceives the prior residents. This is a story of rebirth and how we live on.

I really enjoyed this. There are some interesting things happening here structurally and I’m excited to grab a finished copy to explore, but I’m very grateful to @randomhouse to read this prior to its publication on Tuesday! I was mesmerized by the prose and storytelling and think will probably never forget this book (and I forget a lot of books).


⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

Daniel Mason's collection of intertwined stories is both uplifting and solemn at the same time. It is a testament to the human spirit, connections between the past and present, and the unwavering strength of nature running through it all.

There's a bit of a fever dream feeling to this novel, wherein the reader drifts from story to story, but I personally found it impossible to look away. It made me want to travel to New England and find this apple orchard and explore it for myself. To feel the connection to the people and the land.

An absolutely beautiful book, the language is lyrical and descriptive, but manages to avoid the dreaded purple prose which usually has me skimming pages and racing through sections. It is truly captivating, and I have absolute faith in the rumblings that this could very well be this years Pulitzer Prize winner.

My deepest appreciation to Daniel Mason, Random House Publishing, and NetGalley for the digital review copy. All opinions included herein are my own.

An intriguing and lyrical series of linked stories and poetry all centered around a yellow house in the woods. Spanning 400 years, this starts with a couple who have escaped their Puritan families and then moves to Charles Osgood, who is obsessed with apples, and then his twin daughters, and so on. It's told not only in prose but also in poetry and in letters between two men with a secret and in psychiatric reports. Characters repeat through their families but always, always, the house is there. It's not a happy place- there's more tragedy, pain, and strife than joy but there is pleasure in the woods and trees. It hits multiple themes of racism, slavery, LGBTQ, mental illness, the environment but never hectors. I suspect some might skip the poems and others might find the initial chapters off-putting but keep reading- and know that you might need to reorient yourself as things move forward. I'll be the odd one out on not liking the end but that's a small thing in terms of the overall novel. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. A terrific read.

Thank you Penguin Random House and Net Galley for providing me with an advance copy of this unforgettable novel that I have urged my literary friends to read immediately and my book clubs to put on their schedules of upcoming books. Mason, an assistant professor at Stanford University whose “A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth” was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, introduces us to a coterie of cottage denizens in rural Western Massachusetts in a novel that spans more than 400 years from the middle of the 17th century to an indeterminate future when climate change has irrevocably altered the earth. Mason opens the novel by introducing carefree lovers who had met in church and were escaping a repressive Puritan village. She was to have wed a minister twice her age whose first wife had died in childbirth and he was said to be “ungodly, consorting with heathens.” Deciding where to build shelter in the forest, “he found a wide, flat stone, pried it from the earth and carried it back into the clearing, where he laid it gently in the soil. Here." From that decision, a universe of dozens of characters — human, animal and supernatural — is generated.

In the beautifully imagined arcs that follow, a woman and her child who were taken hostage by native Americans are sheltered by a woman who “spoke both English and the heathen’s tongue.” That woman takes extreme action against the soldiers gathering to avenge the murders of the colonists “so the Evil stops.” An Englishman who had come to America to serve in the French and Indian War, leaves the military and devotes himself to farming. With his twin girls, Mary and Alice, he worked the land and cultivated an apple he named the “Osgood Wonder.” The novel takes a macabre and shockingly violent turn when it focuses on the joint proprietors of the Osgood Wonder who tended to the orchards for 41 years after the death of their father, navigating war, envy and desire. Suitors came and went, recognizing the futility of their petitions. “And Alice yearned.” In a comic twist, the Farnsworths retain a charlatan, Anastasia Rossi, born Edith Simmons, to dispatch the ghosts that threaten their “Serengeti of Massachusetts,” the hunting lodge that Mr. Farnsworth thought would attract the likes of President Roosevelt.

In addition to his conventional narrative, Mason plays with structure, enlisting memoir, poems, ballads, and an address to a historical society to convey his story. The tragic tale of a friendship turned forbidden romance between renowned landscape painter and resident William Henry Teale and author Erasmus Nash is conveyed through letters. Teale writes about the old home: “new wing goes up, old one becomes the servants’ quarters, old servants’ quarters become the barn, old barn becomes the carriage house, and so on. They molt, these houses!” In “Case Notes on Robert S.,” a psychiatrist pays a visit to a young resident suffering from possible schizophrenia noting his observations. In “Murder Most Cold,” Jack Dunne, a reporter for a pulpy crime magazine, is summoned from New York to investigate a gory death on the property and publishes a lurid story.

Mason’s characters’ presence within nature, as part of the environment and its formation, allows the author to display his affection for the natural world, with lush, evocative descriptions of the Massachusetts landscape through the years and seasons. He has a taste for the fanciful, reflected in vivid accounts of the travels of ship’s ballast that contains seed that scatter and germinate when the ballast is dumped at the harbor, invading the native grasses and a lusty beetle's mating dance that dooms the property's elm trees. Mason does not shy away from the violence in nature, relaying how the Osgood’s Merino sheep were dispatched by the stalking panther who lurks in the pages. This is a stunning, kaleidoscopic novel set against beautiful writing on nature.

I really enjoyed this book by Mason, my first of this authors. I have always been fascinated with the lives lived in homes, and this is exactly what this story is about. A home, the land that surrounds it and its inhabitants through the centuries. Behind the walls of this home there is so much love, dissension, trauma, words spoken and unspoken. Interspersed throughout are short stories and poetry. I liked how this all came together .
Thanks for Random House and NetGalley for an early arc.

Have you ever wondered about the history of the home you live in? The woods you walk in? North Woods has taken on that theme through a series of interconnected stories. Not only do we walk through the woods with each inhabitant, each inhabitant walks through the woods with some of the past inhabitants. The story of the cabin begins when the Massachusetts colony forms and the reader follows the history as the cabin is built into a house, becomes a family home, an famous apple orchard, falls multiple times into disrepair, is a murder scene (a few times) and always haunted (literally) with its past.

While the first story had me wondering if I would get into the novel (it was a bit slow), I really enjoyed this one – the concept, most of the stories and the fact that the characters (even after they died) kept returning. This wasn’t a book of short stories per se because the main character was always present – it was the house, but it had the element that I love about short stories – the interconnectedness. This was well written and engaging.

4.25 stars

Thank you NetGalley and Random House for the Arc to review

Whose woods these are we may think we know, but we are very likely wrong, as Daniel Mason's lovely, prismatically-shifting novel reminds us time and time again. Opening with a jubilant burst of pastoral energy, Mason lays the geographical groundwork and framing of wooded landscape and house that will serve as the book's setting from the get-go. And then proceeds to meander, complicate, deepen, and invert/subvert/all the -verts our narrative expectations. The idea of a novel structured around a single place is not, of course, new or unique--Pitchaya Sudbanthad's Bangkok Wakes to Rain, for instance, brilliantly traces the life-history of a single house in Krungthep or Bangkok, from its origins in the 19th century to a vision of the future that feels all-too-palpably plausible given the news. Like Mason's, Sudbanthad's range is not confined to the temporal plane; each novel explores a range of characters and perspectives, and Sudbanthad even goes beyond the human in various places, convincingly making a case that we need to think beyond the human if we have any hope of understanding our condition, much less remedying it. Where North Woods feels different is in its continual reinvention of its style and genre, a changeability which creates a narrative pastiche. Maybe, to draw from one of the book's own motifs, succession is a more apt metaphor. Through the tall tale, letters, songs, and various points of view, the composition of the narrative is always changing, yet one feels the presence of those species that were formerly dominant, as though they are inhabiting the soil and air, in some cases as memories and in some as ghostly presences.

The challenge borne by a book like this is that of hooking readers into each of the stories/songs/tales, or if not all of them enough so that we don't find ourselves distracted in our wistfulness for previous chapters, characters, and storylines. Books like Cloud Atlas and The Overstory manage this challenge by bringing back previous threads just when they seem to have been jettisoned forever, and the latter case, which Mason's book resembles at times, amasses its disparate branches and tendrils into a single narrative canopy. Mason's remains disparate, yet there are enough thematic connections between characters, time periods, and sections that we are never fully lost in his woods--more like happily wandering. With songs, no less! Moreover, enough of the individual stories are riveting unto themselves, and they drew me as a reader in so fully that I didn't mind moving on. Among the most memorable is the figure of the "Apple-man" who fills pages with the rich, fecund pursuit of "pomomania," an apple obsession and cult of cultivation whose likes I've only encountered in the pages of Matt Bell's Appleseed: "And I came to realize that the country was overflowing: scraggly crab trees grown up from cores tossed off in roadside culverts, ranks of stately Newtown Pippins, unnamed heirlooms growing in solitude in a settler's yard....it was as if one might subtract all matter but the apple tree and still see, in what remained, the contours of the world." Mason's love of language, evident throughout the novel, shows through in wordplay here: "mull" and "appellation" are used in one sentence, for instance. The character, Osgood's, twin daughter's, Mary and Alice, also feature in a story that is by turns mesmerizing and harrowing; here, Mason deploys the free-wheeling point of view he's availed himself of with aplomb and to great, and chilling, effect.

Unlike some other novels that abide by such a networked structure, North Woods never makes it to the present or the future, yet the concerns of our time, unsurprisingly, loom over all. We see the preoccupation with the fraught relationship between natural and human time and again, and the ways that the human attempt to control nature is often futile, and just as often a ruse or excuse for the ways humans elect to subjugate other humans. We see the seeds of climate change, and it's impossible for me personally to read this New England novel without thinking of the way Vermont, thought to be a relative sanctuary from the front lines, faced devastating flooding earlier this year. In this context, the character of Robert is all the more fascinating; deemed mentally ill for his quixotic insistence that walking the land is an attempt to heal it (one can easily imagine a would-be latter-day transcendentalist taking this on as a GoFundMe), he calls our attention to the societal illnesses, mental and otherwise, that we inflict on the landscape. By its end, it is not entirely clear whether Mason's novel is an elegy for the anthropocene, a wake-up call, or a consolation; most likely it is all of these. For why should such a versatile book, as patient in its tending to a single plot of land as it is restless in its plotting, limit itself to one?

Thanks to NetGalley for an epub ARC of this book.

I love books where places feel like a character, so this book is right up my alley. I've been slowly, over years been reading a book (or books) about all 50 states. This one definitely fits the bill as it is a story about the land itself and the people, and things, through the centuries who inhabit it. It is a hard book to describe but essentially it is a ghost story, a murder mystery, and a beautiful piece of writing.

Four powerful themes weave together this novel set in the woods of Western Massachusetts: a single house and its myriad occupants across centuries, the ghosts of the inhabitants who linger in the house and can be perceived by some of the house’s occupants, a deep dive into the natural world and ever-changing woods that surround the house, and lastly the sweep of historical events as impacting the house’s owners.

The yellow house first gets constructed as small cabin, built by lovers who have run away from their Puritan colony. Next comes an English soldier and his spinster daughters who devotedly tend an apple orchard producing an extraordinarily delicious apple. What follows is a diverse cast of characters and lots of mayhem and murder: from people killed by the early settlers to a true crime reporter finding their mass grave, a gay naturalist painter who longs for his forbidden love, a Caribbean nurse, a killing panther, a famous actor, a deranged son who can see all the ghosts, and so on. Each of 12 stories get told connected to months of the year, and seasons of the woods.

Throughout out everything’s bursting with life: the bounty of nature, the string of people who live in the house, and even the ghosts themselves. And everything’s ultimately, deeply bound together across space and time.

Sumptuous pose dives deep into the natural world and humans’ fleeting place within it.

Thanks to Random House and NetGalley for an advanced reader’s copy.

I loved the premise of this novel: stories about the inhabitants of one piece of property over the decades. However, I found much of the book to be weird. While some of the characters had compelling histories, others included murderers, an obsessed apple grower, twin spinster sisters, a schizophrenic, an adulterer, a psychic, gay lovers, ghosts, prisoners, and a hungry catamount (a mix between a mountain lion and a bobcat.)

I will probably be an outlier on this one. The professional reviewers are loving it. The flowery writing and occasional poetry just weren't my cup of tea.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this unique novel.

I was drawn to read this novel based on its unique, compelling, and bold concept. The main emphasis is not on characters, or time, or anything that typically defines the existence of people, flora, insects or fauna, but rather on a specific piece of land. It is through the land that we learn of all the things that inhabit it over the course of 400+ years.

Daniel Mason's beautifully descriptive and flowing writing tells us of this place in the Massachusetts woods, who has lived there, the events that happened to them and the land they inhabited for a while. Their stories are interesting, some more than others, but what strikes the reader between the eyes, is the transient nature of ALL those who lived there. Their lives, their dreams, their very existence had but a fleeting impact on the land they inhabited, the land they considered theirs.

This novel beautifully shows the connection between people, eras, and the environment around them through the lens of the land and time. While not every individual story touched me, the overall work is a masterpiece that may in time become the classic it deserves to be. One of the best books I've read, I highly recommend you not miss it.

My thanks to Random House Publishing for allowing me to read a DRC via NetGalley. The book is scheduled for publication on 9/19/23. All opinions expressed in this review are my own and are freely given.

North Woods
By Daniel Mason

This is a very interesting story. It is about a plot of land in western Massachusetts and how, over time, the various owners occupy it. The first occupants are a pair of star-crossed lovers , runaways to their "acadia".

The second is a British soldier and widower, pre-revolutionary war, who searches for a specific piece of land on which to grow an orchard of apples of a very specific type. He finally finds this parcel and brings his young twin daughters to live here. When the revolutionary war begins, he leaves the land and goes off to fight on behalf of the king and returns only to be buried there.

The twins, Mary and Alice, are identical physically but not in other ways. They live together for many years, Alice longing for a suitor and Mary doing all she can to thwart the plan.

The next segment deals with a runaway slave and the slave hunter who tracks her and her baby to this abandoned house. After that comes the painter and his family and so on and so on.

Each of these segments is interesting, providing the reader with much information about life in this area over different periods of time. The book as a whole is one I would recommend to anyone interested in early American history.