Barkskins: A Novel

ISBN: 0743288793

Author: Proulx, Annie

Condition: New

Now a mini-series on National Geographic!A Washington Post Best Book of the Year & a New York Times Notable BookFrom the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain comes the New York Times bestselling epic about the demise of the worlds forests.Barkskins is grand entertainment in the tradition of Dickens and Tolstoythe crowning achievement of Annie Proulxs distinguished career, but also perhaps the greatest environmental novel ever written -San Francisco ChronicleIn 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 woodcutters-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 and the consequences of environmental exploitation and colonialism.A stunning, bracing, full-tilt ride through three hundred years of US and Canadian historywith the type of full-immersion plot that keeps you curled in your chair, reluctant to stop reading (Elle), Barkskins showcases Proulxs 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.