A magnificent generational saga that charts a family s rise and fall, its secrets and inherited crimes, from one of Canada s most acclaimed novelists
Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize A rugged, riveting novel . . . This superb family saga will satisfy fans of Richard Powers s The Overstory. Publishers Weekly (starred review)
There are plenty of visionary moments laced into [Christie s] shape-shifting narrative. . . . Greenwood penetrates to the core of things. The New York Times Book Review
It s 2038 and 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. It s 2008 and Liam Greenwood is a carpenter, sprawled on his back after a workplace fall, calling out from the concrete floor of an empty mansion. It s 1974 and Willow Greenwood is out of jail, free after being locked up for one of her endless series of environmental protests: attempts at atonement for the sins of her father s once vast and violent timber empire. It s 1934 and 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.
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. 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.
