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.

Wow, I want to start with how beautiful the writing was in this book. I could picture things so clearly and feel what the characters were feeling. Next, the execution of this book is so unique. Instead of following a person or a family we are following a house and its surroundings. For centuries. This was truly incredible.

A page turner. Well paced and thoughtful.
Many thanks to Random House and to Netgalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

The North Woods by Daniel Mason is an all-encompassing story about a house in the "north woods" of Western Massachusetts, and all of its inhabitants throughout the centuries.

The descriptive language, the characters, and the ways in which the author would hint at the period of time are all key elements of the story that I enjoyed! I was able to visualize each description of the scenery, every animal in the woods, and heard each sound described.

All characters were all three-dimensional, and I especially enjoyed how the author focused on particular characters in the story, while briefly introducing others. Separation and determination of time period throughout the book were important since the book covered so much ground. Interludes and ballads were used sporadically to determine change in time period, which I had never seen before in a book.

I will definitely be recommending North Woods by Daniel Mason to fellow readers!

Thank you to NetGalley for providing an advanced e-copy of North Woods by Daniel Mason.

Over centuries and generations, the stories of those who inhabit a single house in rural New England. Beginning with a young couple in love running from a Puritan colony, building a small one room cottage from stone. Then a retired (French & Indian War) British officer and widower purchases the land, adds to the house, and moves his twin daughters there to build an apple orchard. Each successive owner/resident has a story that is told. Part ghost story and part haunted house story, Mason writes in varying styles and uses varying writing devices, yet the book is not disjointed - it just works.

A beautifully written novel about a house and those that live and love inside.

Each of the 12 stories have elements of nature, each of the 12 stories contain glorious prose. Daniel Mason is clearly a rare talent and this book HAS to be on many of the best of lists for 2023.

I want to be in that house. I want to live in that world. I want read more Daniel Mason.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review.

North Woods is a sweeping, multigenerational story about a forest in New York state that lends its footprint to a home. That home will expand and house a myriad who occupy it both happily and in torment, corporally and as specters.

A young couple fleeing the strictures of Puritan life will first settle the land. Their cabin is later occupied by two women who survive different Indigenous raiding parties through the mercy of one warrior. Men will later come upon them, one offers an apple with ill intent, and from that moment a chain of destinies are set beginning with Major Charles Osgood. A dream compels him to abandon the martial life after a close call in battle to become an apple grower. His quest is for the perfect apple, a sublime one. He finds it on this remote tract of land where the apple seed, buried through tragedy, has become a tree. Osgood will expand the cabin into a home that will serve as the setting for future generations.

This story is a testament to nature and the smallest of her creatures, a love story to the earth and a reprimand to the ravages of humankind.

This novel will be released on September 19, 2023.

Many thanks to Random House and NetGalley for providing this eARC.

North Woods by Daniel Mason is a highly recommended imaginative historical fiction, but with a different point of reference.

This is a novel about all the lives that lived in a single house in the woods of New England. The novel consists of twelve stories that tie into the seasons and months of the year, all set around the land and house, beginning with two young Puritan lovers who escaped from their colony. Residents also include in part, an English soldier who wants an apple orchard, twin sisters, a landscape painter, the wealthy Farnsworths, and subsequently their daughter and her schizophrenic son, Robert, and a true crime writer.

This is also the story of the land, animals, insects, spores, etc., and the changes experienced over the years. Finally, it is a ghost story, where the former inhabitants may still be haunting the area. Included within the narrative at different points are also folk ballads, letters, diary entries, real estate listing, and accounts of nature's changes, seeds, blights and insects coming to the land. Taken in totality, it all culminates in a tale of how all things in a specific environments are interconnected over time.

The quality of the writing is simply gorgeous and undeniably compelling. The writing will pull you in and keep you reading, however, as with any collection of interconnected stories, not all stories will be as compelling as others throughout the whole novel. The structure and decision to tell a story in this manner, over decades and through different characters on one piece of land, is interesting yet also challenging. I was not especially interested in all the characters and ghosts, however I kept reading for the little gems within the writing.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Random House via NetGalley.
The review will be published on Barnes & Noble, BookBrowse, X, Edelweiss, and Amazon.

This book was like nothing I was expecting.
It is well written but it just wasn’t to my liking.
Thanks to the publisher for the early copy

3.5 stars rounded down to 3.

I am a huge fan of multi-generational books, so I was excited to be able to read North Woods which gives the multi-generational plot line a bit of a twist where the house and surrounding property are the main characters in the story. Spanning from colonial times to modern day, Mason’s book covers the lives and deaths that occur on the property with brief glimpses into the lives of the inhabitants.

Although beautifully written with gorgeous descriptions of nature, ultimately I had a difficult time connecting the characters that lived in the house as our time with them was incredibly brief. I did, however love the surprise supernatural aspect that permeated throughout the story. I felt that the ghosts could have, ironically, been more fleshed out and their ability to interact with the living better explained. The interludes, as well, were interesting, yet felt disconnected from the overall story.

For anyone who loves literary fiction, nature writings, or wants to dip their toes into magical realism/supernatural elements, I would recommend this one. If you are looking for a multi-generational story closer to Roots or Homegoing that focuses more on family, I feel like this one will fall flat for you.

Thank you to NetGalley, Daniel Mason, and Random House for an advanced reader’s copy in exchange for an honest review.