Barkskins: A Novel: Annie Proulx - Softcover

"Monumental. [With] prose of directness, clarity, rhythmic power and oaken solidity. . . Barkskins is a potently imagined chronicle of mankind's dealings with the North American forests."--Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"Barkskins is masterful, full of an urgent, tense lyricism, its plotting beautifully unexpected, its biographical narratives flowing into one another like the seasons. Ambitious. . . A marvel. . .[Barkskins] is a long novel worth your time."--Charles Finch, USA Today

"[It's] a tale too beautiful to miss, excellent for long afternoons spent swaying in a hammock."--Good Housekeeping

"Magnificent... Barkskins flies... One of the chief pleasures of Proulx's prose is that it conveys you to so many vanished wildwoods, where you get to stand 'tiny and amazed in the kingdom of pines.' This is also the great sadness of Barkskins. The propulsive tension here is generated not by wondering what will happen to each character, but by knowing that the forests will be leveled one after another... If Barkskins doesn't bear exquisite witness to our species's insatiable appetite for consumption, nothing can."--Anthony Doerr, Outside Magazine

"A masterpiece."--Buzzfeed

"Annie Proulx's Barkskins is remarkable not just for its length, but for its scope and ambition. It's a monumental achievement, one that will perhaps be remembered as her finest work. . . It's exhilarating to read Proulx, a master storyteller; she is as adept at placing us in the dripping, cold Mi'kma'ki forests as in the stuffy Duke & Sons parlors. Despite the length, nothing seems extraneous, and not once does the reader sense the story slipping from Proulx's grasp, resulting in the kind of immersive reading experience that only comes along every few years."--Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Part ecological fable à la Ursula K. Le Guin, part foundational saga along the lines of Brian Moore's Black Robe and, yes, James Michener's Centennial, Proulx's story builds in depth and complication without becoming unduly tangled and is always told with the most beautiful language. Another tremendous book from Proulx, sure to find and enthrall many readers."--Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

"Proulx's signature passion and concern for nature as well as her unnerving forensic fascination with all the harm that can befall the human body charge this rigorously researched, intrepidly imagined, complexly plotted, and vigorously written multigenerational epic. [With an] extensive and compelling cast, Proulx's commanding epic about the annihilation of our forests is nothing less than a sylvan Moby-Dick replete with ardently exacting details about tree cutting from Canada and Maine to Michigan, California, and New Zealand, with dramatic cross-cultural relationships and with the peculiar madness catalyzed by nature's glory. Here, too, are episodes of profound suffering and loss, ambition and conviction, courage and love. With a forthcoming National Geographic Channel series expanding its reach, Proulx's commanding, perspective-altering epic will be momentous."--Booklist, Starred Review

"Barkskins is an awesome monument of a book, a spectacular survey of America's forests dramatized by a cast of well-hewn characters.Such is the magnetism of Proulx's narrative that there's no resisting her thundering cascade of stories. A vast woods you'll want to get lost in. . . Barkskins is a towering new work of environmental fiction."--Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"Annie Proulx returns with a great long read for the summer . . . Worth the wait, [Barkskins is] a stunning, bracing, full-tilt ride through 300 years of U.S. and Canadian history, told through two families whose fortunes are shaped, for better and worse, by the Europeans' discovery of North America's vast forests. With Barkskins, Annie Proulx blows out the horizons. The novel has a satisfying global sweep, with the type of full-immersion plot that keeps you curled in your chair, reluctant to stop reading. Barkskins is a tour de force."--Elle

Finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Best Novel
A New York Times Notable Book
A Washington Post Best Book of the Year

From the Pulitzer Prize-­­winning author of The Shipping News and “Brokeback Mountain,” comes the New York Times bestselling epic about the demise of the world’s forests: “Barkskins is grand entertainment in the tradition of Dickens and Tolstoy...the crowning achievement of Annie Proulx’s distinguished career, but also perhaps the greatest environmental novel ever written” (San Francisco Chronicle).

In the late seventeenth century two young Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord for three years in exchange for land, they become wood-cutters—barkskins. René suffers extraordinary hardship, oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He is forced to marry a native woman and their descendants live trapped between two cultures. But Duquet runs away, becomes a fur trader, then sets up a timber business. Annie Proulx tells the stories of the descendants of Sel and Duquet over three hundred years—their travels across North America, to Europe, China, and New Zealand—the revenge of rivals, accidents, pestilence, Indian attacks, and cultural annihilation. Over and over, they seize what they can of a presumed infinite resource, leaving the modern-day characters face to face with possible ecological collapse.

“A stunning, bracing, full-tilt ride through three hundred years of US and Canadian history...with the type of full-immersion plot that keeps you curled in your chair, reluctant to stop reading” (Elle), Barkskins showcases Proulx’s inimitable genius of creating characters who are so vivid that we follow them with fierce attention. “This is Proulx at the height of her powers as an irreplaceable American voice” (Entertainment Weekly, Grade A), and Barkskins “is an awesome monument of a book” (The Washington Post)—“the masterpiece she was meant to write” (The Boston Globe). As Anthony Doerr says, “This magnificent novel possesses the dark humor of The Shipping News and the social awareness of ‘Brokeback Mountain.’”