What readers think of North Woods, plus links to write your own review.

I just finished North Woods in a rush, eager to know the ending and yet not wanting it to end. What a breathtaking book! It follows the many people who inhabit a particular house in Massachusetts throughout the centuries. It is a microcosm of the American story from the Puritans to the not so distant future. Beautifully written - a times lyrical, at times folksy, always surprisingly original. Daniel Mason not only creates a huge cast of characters, he writes with such love about the trees, the flowers, the seasons off this bit of New England forest. Indeed the woods are a character in themselves. Throughout the centuries, the house sees murder, love, despair and thwarted hopes, and the presence of each inhabitant lives on. The best book I’ve read in years.

I just finished North Woods in a rush, eager to know the ending and yet not wanting it to end. What a breathtaking book! It follows the many people who inhabit a particular house in Massachusetts throughout the centuries. It is a microcosm of the American story from the Puritans to the not so distant future. Beautifully written - a times lyrical, at times folksy, always surprisingly original. Daniel Mason not only creates a huge cast of characters, he writes with such love about the trees, the flowers, the seasons off this bit of New England forest. Indeed the woods are a character in themselves. Throughout the centuries, the house sees murder, love, despair and thwarted hopes, and the presence of each inhabitant lives on. The best book I’ve read in years. Magical and riveting. Not sentimental. Original characters.
North Woods” proves captivating despite its piecemeal structure is testament to Mason's powers as a writer, his stylish and supple narrative voice. The novel lives in its oddments, arrayed for us by an author-collector well versed in pre-modern fruit farming, folk medicine and popular songs through the ages.

A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries—a daring, moving tale of memory and fate from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier.

When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become home to an extraordinary succession of inhabitants . An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins survive war and famine, only to succumb to envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths a mass grave, but finds the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle; as each one confronts the mysteries of the north woods, they come to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.

Traversing cycles of history, nature, and even literature, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment and to one another, across time, language and space. Written along with the seasons and divided into the twelve months of the year, it is an unforgettable novel about secrets and fates that asks the timeless how do we live on, even after we’re gone?
I just finished North Woods in a rush, eager to know the ending and yet not wanting it to end. What a breathtaking book! It follows the many people who inhabit a particular house in Massachusetts throughout the centuries. It is a microcosm of the American story from the Puritans to the not so distant future. Beautifully written - a times lyrical, at times folksy, always surprisingly original. Daniel Mason not only creates a huge cast of characters, he writes with such love about the trees, the flowers, the seasons off this bit of New England forest. Indeed the woods are a character in themselves. Throughout the centuries, the house sees murder, love, despair and thwarted hopes, and the presence of each inhabitant lives on. The best book I’ve read in years.

I've read each of Mason's novels, but this is THE best. It reads as if it is a series of short stories when, in actuality, it's a sequence of vignettes that happen on the same wooded property in New England. I often thought well that character's gone. Not so.
The writing is exquisite. Mason's descriptions demonstrates his admiration of nature. (I did wonder how a native Californian seemed to know so much about "North Woods" but, I found he attended Harvard. Ah ha!)
The book would fit into so many genres, even some I would have chosen to avoid. No quibbles. I loved them all.
This book was like an endless Christmas presents. So many gifts, not knowing what was in each package.

I was thoroughly surprised and entertained with the depth of this epic story. The author is genius in changing voice and language styles as you are pulled through the centuries and introduced to its characters. Among these, along with the humans who inhabit the house, are all kind of fauna and flora, including the smallest of these. The book begins four centuries ago and proceeds though pastoral settings and pioneering settlers cultivating the landscape and cohabiting with nature. Time passes and and events will shock the reader, shocked like the drop at the top of a roller coaster! The author weaves events and characters skillfully throughout the book. I'd love to visit North Woods.

To call these linked stories would do this sweeping novel injustice. The stories are rooted to the ground, overgrowing one another to create a marvelous forest -- a wondrous palimpsest. The novel's fertile ground is a single house in the woods of Western Massachusetts, inhabited by first one soul then another and another. All iterations feature richly drawn characters -- Puritan lovers gone wild, an English soldier utterly infatuated with apples, his spinster twin daughters torn by passion and envy. Further inhabitants -- humans, as well as a mountain lion on the prowl and a ravenous beetle -- claim proceeding chapters. This novel looks at history and the cycles of nature, asking where do we fit in, what are our roles -- during and after our lives? What are our passions, what do we do with them, and how do these actions affect this place we inhabit? I was totally enthralled, beginning to end. Highly recommend.

This book might be subtitled, “What we do for love”: love of place, nature, parents, children, siblings; romantic love and illicit love, platonic and physical.

This remarkable collection of linked stories is told in different voices from different times, with many contemporaneous social and cultural issues explored. These range from colonial settlers in the 17th century, to apple growers in the 18th, to the slave catcher in mid-19th century, the séance in the early 20th century, and the treatment of mental illness in the mid-20th.

There are riddles, ballads, and ghost stories, and writing that seems to come right from the first-hand accounts of captured colonial settlers as well as Victorian authors like Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, and 1950’s-60’s pulp crime fiction.

The North Woods gradually comes into view as the dense forests and mountains of western Massachusetts. Over time the forest is transformed by nature and man, and yet the home site, a yellow house built in the 1700’s, remains, serving as place for varied epiphanies as it is visited by new people and old ghosts. As the author writes, “The only way to see the world other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.”

This book captures both loss and change, giving a vivid and thought-provoking perspective on humans and their humanity across time

American novelist and doctor Daniel Mason is already well known for his wonderfully atmospheric historical novels The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier. North Woods sees him explore innovative approaches to historical fiction, and even surpasses those earlier books. The narrative begins in the 1760s and continues through to the present day – and then moves further into some undated moment in the future. It tells the story of a “remote station of the north woods” in Massachusetts, and a lemon-yellow house with a tall black door that is built in this “hilly, snow-dusted country” which lies towards “sun’s fall”.