North Woods
Daniel Mason's 2023 novel is built around a single yellow house and the patch of western Massachusetts woods around it, and it follows the people, animals, and ghosts who pass through that one place across roughly four hundred years. The book opens with a pair of seventeenth-century Puritan lovers fleeing into the forest, and it moves forward through a Revolutionary War apple farmer obsessed with a single perfect cultivar, his twin spinster daughters, a runaway enslaved man, a transcendentalist painter and his unraveling sister, a true-crime writer chasing a nineteenth-century murder, a contemporary ecologist tracking a deadly beetle, and on into the future. Mason structures the book as a kind of nested archive, letters, ballads, court records, scientific reports, and the result is both a haunted-house novel and a slow, quiet ecological history. North Woods was a New York Times Book Review Top Ten title for 2023.
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What you might want to know about North Woods
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A single house in the Massachusetts woods is built by a fleeing Puritan couple in the 17th century and changes hands across the next four hundred years. The novel is a series of linked stories of its inhabitants.
North Woods was written by Daniel Mason and published in 2023. Mason is a Stanford psychiatrist who has written several literary novels including The Piano Tuner and A Far Country.
North Woods follows a single Massachusetts house through hundreds of years across multiple narrators and styles. The structure can be demanding because characters do not recur. Most readers find rewards in the cumulative meditation on time and place.
North Woods is 274 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, North Woods takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
North Woods is a standalone novel by Daniel Mason, not part of a series.
North Woods is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
