GREENWOOD
By Michael Christie
McClelland & Stewart, September 24, 2019 / Hogarth, February 2020
It's 2034 and 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, fallen from a ladder and sprawled on his broken back, 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 an 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 in the web of a crime that will cling to his family for decades.
And throughout, there are trees: thrumming a steady, silent pulse beneath Christie's effortless sentences and 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, love, wood, and blood--and the hopeful, impossible task of growing toward the light.
About the Author
Michael Christie is the author of If I Fall, If I Die, which was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, won the Northern Lit Award, and was selected as a New York Times Editors Choice. His collection of short stories, The Beggar's Garden, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, a finalist for the Writers' Trust Prize for Fiction, and won the Vancouver Book Award. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Globe & Mail. A former sponsored skateboarder, he holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and lives on Galiano Island with his wife and two sons.