Why did I love this book?
This book is a sweeping, multi-generational epic that is, at its core, about the destruction of the great American forests.
Annie Proulx writes so breathtakingly about the natural world, and is also able to conjure such vivid characters through the generations.
But what I love most about this book is how it connects unexpected places – like 16th Century Canada and Japan, or 18th Century California and New Zealand – reminding us that history is not confined to any one place.
5 authors picked Barkskins as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
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From Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain, comes her masterwork: an epic, dazzling, violent, magnificently dramatic novel about the taking down of the world's forests.
In the late seventeenth century two penniless young Frenchmen, Rene Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord, a "seigneur," for three years in exchange for land, they become wood-cutters - barkskins. Rene suffers extraordinary hardship, oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He is forced to…