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A review by scribepub
Greenwood by Michael Christie
This book is why we read books. Why we need books. Wildly inventive, structurally elegant, deeply felt, and so very wise. Greenwood is Michael Christie’s best work ever, and that’s saying something.
Alexander MacLeod, author of Light Lifting
Greenwood is brilliant. Michael Christie shows a cross section of one family's history, revealing their dark secrets, loves, losses, and the mark of an accident still visible four generations later. Year by year, page by page, the layers of this intricate and elegant novel build into an epic story that is completely absorbing. I had to cancel everything for this book because I couldn't stop reading.
Claire Camerson, author of The Last Neanderthal
[An] eerily real-feeling future.
Globe and Mail
Rich with evocative descriptions of West Coast wilderness and anchored by a deep visceral bond to the trees that sustain us all, Greenwood is a literary page-turner that manages to be both nostalgic and modern, personal and political, intimately human and big-picture historical. In an era of so much uncertainty, it is comforting to see novelists begin to work through the biggest issue of our age. And, in this case, convert our collective suffering into brilliant, beauty-filled art.
Toronto Star
[S]tructured like the growth rings of a tree, spanning generation ... [Greenwood] looks at families, love and secrets against the backdrop of the 'magic' of trees.
CBC News
Ingeniously structured and with prose as smooth as beech bark, Michael Christie’s Greenwood is as compulsive as it is profound. A sweeping intergenerational saga that explores trees and their roots, from the precious evergreens that become commodities in the entertainment business of the future, to the intricately tangled trees of family — all of it is dazzlingly delivered in a framework inspired by the actual growth rings of a tree. Every one of Greenwood’s characters burrowed their way into my heart. Beguilingly brilliant, timely, and utterly engrossing, Greenwood is one of my favourite reads in recent memory.
Kira Jane Buxton, author of Hollow Kingdom
At once hypnotic and raging, dangerously real and brimming with hope, Greenwood is that most necessary epic that binds our human frailties to our planet's possibilities. Michael Christie tenderly rakes the past and paints a future without flinching. I read this book with my heart in my throat, in my hands, in my gut; I read this book heart-full.
Katy Simpson Smith, author of The Story of Land and Sea
Greenwood is a family story, fractured and often contradictory (as the best family stories usually are ... bring[ing] together the intimate and the sweeping, the human world and the natural, the past and the future.
Quill & Quire
Ingeniously structured and with prose as smooth as beech bark, Michael Christie’s Greenwood is as compulsive as it is profound. A sweeping intergenerational saga that explores trees and their roots — from the precious evergreens that become commodities in the entertainment business of the future to the intricately tangled trees of family — all of it is dazzlingly delivered in a framework inspired by the actual growth rings of a tree. Every one of Greenwood’s characters burrowed their way into my heart. Beguilingly brilliant, timely, and utterly engrossing, Greenwood is one of my favorite reads in recent memory.
Kira Jane Buxton
Greenwood is a sprawling and ambitious novel of industrial greed, climate catastrophe, familial bonds and a little bit of hope.
Keith Cadieux, Winnipeg Free Press
Whatever 2038 is really like when it arrives, Canadians and others will still be reading Greenwood for its high energy, its memorable characters, and its anguished love for the forests.
Crawford Kilian, The Tyee
A lyrical, meditative take on a world in which forests have become such rare commodities that they are turned into therapeutic retreats for the very wealthy.
Sally Adee, New Scientist
A remarkable achievement.
Carol Off, As It Happens
A dystopian, historical, speculative, multigenerational family saga, this marvellous, generous book is best enjoyed in a forest.
Sharon Bala, author of The Boat People
Astonishing … What makes Greenwood an essential climate-change novel is that, rather than obsessing over a single, final apocalypse to come, it attempts something much harder and more ambitious: to transcend altogether the tropes of victim and antagonist … And to instead present humanity and nature as deeply, ultimately, endlessly interconnected … Greenwood offers a rare sentiment in the climate emergency: hope.
Damian Tarnopolsky, The Walrus
This superb family saga will satisfy fans of Richard Powers’s The Overstory while offering a convincing vision of potential ecological destruction.
Publishers Weekly
Greenwood is a compulsively readable, beautifully observed, deeply felt and rich tale that roves across Canadian history and landscape.
Pile by the Bed
Greenwood is a brilliant novel that demonstrates the ghastly effects of treating the environment as a commodity. This really is a novel for our times.
Theresa Smith Writes
[A] timely, moving novel.
Damien Lawardorn, Aurealis
A compulsively readable, beautifully observed, deeply felt and rich tale that roves across Canadian history and landscape.
Robert Goodman, The Blurb
An arresting eco-parable.
Alfred Hickling, The Guardian
An absorbing and original epic.
Dan Shaw, Happy Magazine
There are plenty of visionary moments laced into [Christie’s] shape-shifting narrative … Greenwood penetrates to the core of things.
Michael Upchurch, The New York Times Book Review
[W]ith the expert, deft hands of a seasoned carpenter, author Michael Christie carefully and methodically pieces together a story as intricate as the rings within a tree. The result is a deeply compelling novel of family and memory … Christie creates a sense of poetic, organic symmetry through rich characters and evocative, almost tactile descriptions … [W]hat stands out most by the end is the way in which Christie has been able to evoke and give voice to the way the cumulative effect of time and memory weighs on us all in ways both uplifting and terrifying. Greenwood is a towering, profound novel about the things that endure even as the world seems to be moving on.
Matthew Jackson, Bookpage
[E]ven if you’re suffering from what you might call Literary Tree Fatigue, Christie’s novel is worth reading, in part because it’s a clever mash-up of genres that distinguishes itself from its literary cousins and earns its bulk … broad messages aside, the heart of the novel is a winning and energetic chase story … When do we choose self-preservation, and when do we choose survival in a broader sense? The question has never gone away, but Greenwood closes with the message that it’s increasingly urgent.
Mark Athitakis, The Washington Post
A riveting tale of love, greed, sacrifice and betrayal – and an ode to the beauty of trees.
Nicole Abadee, The Age
Greenwood’s powerful narratives, fascinating characters, and lovely prose full of beautiful specificity, takes on our contemporary fears for the world. This is one of those novels you thrust at friends and insist: You have to read this! FIVE STARS
Wendy Waring, Good Reading
An impressive ecological novel … From the future, to the present, the past and back again, Greenwood is a moving novel of family sacrifice and love for a natural world.
Colin Steele, The Canberra Times
Christie dazzles with this richly woven historical tracking five generations of the ‘trouble-plagued’ Greenwood clan and the environmental devastation wrought by its lucrative timber empire … [A] spellbinding family saga reflecting fiction's intensifying interest in the climate crisis as well as humanity's innate desire to make amends for past wrongs and start anew. STARRED REVIEW
Annalisa Pešek, Library Journal
A celebration of nature. A complex, multigenerational family drama. A fight to save a dying planet. Michael Christie’s Greenwood is these things and more. It’s a transportive story that invites you to commune with nature and understand that our lives are inseparable from the natural world around us.
Eugen Bacon, Aurealis
Alexander MacLeod, author of Light Lifting
Greenwood is brilliant. Michael Christie shows a cross section of one family's history, revealing their dark secrets, loves, losses, and the mark of an accident still visible four generations later. Year by year, page by page, the layers of this intricate and elegant novel build into an epic story that is completely absorbing. I had to cancel everything for this book because I couldn't stop reading.
Claire Camerson, author of The Last Neanderthal
[An] eerily real-feeling future.
Globe and Mail
Rich with evocative descriptions of West Coast wilderness and anchored by a deep visceral bond to the trees that sustain us all, Greenwood is a literary page-turner that manages to be both nostalgic and modern, personal and political, intimately human and big-picture historical. In an era of so much uncertainty, it is comforting to see novelists begin to work through the biggest issue of our age. And, in this case, convert our collective suffering into brilliant, beauty-filled art.
Toronto Star
[S]tructured like the growth rings of a tree, spanning generation ... [Greenwood] looks at families, love and secrets against the backdrop of the 'magic' of trees.
CBC News
Ingeniously structured and with prose as smooth as beech bark, Michael Christie’s Greenwood is as compulsive as it is profound. A sweeping intergenerational saga that explores trees and their roots, from the precious evergreens that become commodities in the entertainment business of the future, to the intricately tangled trees of family — all of it is dazzlingly delivered in a framework inspired by the actual growth rings of a tree. Every one of Greenwood’s characters burrowed their way into my heart. Beguilingly brilliant, timely, and utterly engrossing, Greenwood is one of my favourite reads in recent memory.
Kira Jane Buxton, author of Hollow Kingdom
At once hypnotic and raging, dangerously real and brimming with hope, Greenwood is that most necessary epic that binds our human frailties to our planet's possibilities. Michael Christie tenderly rakes the past and paints a future without flinching. I read this book with my heart in my throat, in my hands, in my gut; I read this book heart-full.
Katy Simpson Smith, author of The Story of Land and Sea
Greenwood is a family story, fractured and often contradictory (as the best family stories usually are ... bring[ing] together the intimate and the sweeping, the human world and the natural, the past and the future.
Quill & Quire
Ingeniously structured and with prose as smooth as beech bark, Michael Christie’s Greenwood is as compulsive as it is profound. A sweeping intergenerational saga that explores trees and their roots — from the precious evergreens that become commodities in the entertainment business of the future to the intricately tangled trees of family — all of it is dazzlingly delivered in a framework inspired by the actual growth rings of a tree. Every one of Greenwood’s characters burrowed their way into my heart. Beguilingly brilliant, timely, and utterly engrossing, Greenwood is one of my favorite reads in recent memory.
Kira Jane Buxton
Greenwood is a sprawling and ambitious novel of industrial greed, climate catastrophe, familial bonds and a little bit of hope.
Keith Cadieux, Winnipeg Free Press
Whatever 2038 is really like when it arrives, Canadians and others will still be reading Greenwood for its high energy, its memorable characters, and its anguished love for the forests.
Crawford Kilian, The Tyee
A lyrical, meditative take on a world in which forests have become such rare commodities that they are turned into therapeutic retreats for the very wealthy.
Sally Adee, New Scientist
A remarkable achievement.
Carol Off, As It Happens
A dystopian, historical, speculative, multigenerational family saga, this marvellous, generous book is best enjoyed in a forest.
Sharon Bala, author of The Boat People
Astonishing … What makes Greenwood an essential climate-change novel is that, rather than obsessing over a single, final apocalypse to come, it attempts something much harder and more ambitious: to transcend altogether the tropes of victim and antagonist … And to instead present humanity and nature as deeply, ultimately, endlessly interconnected … Greenwood offers a rare sentiment in the climate emergency: hope.
Damian Tarnopolsky, The Walrus
This superb family saga will satisfy fans of Richard Powers’s The Overstory while offering a convincing vision of potential ecological destruction.
Publishers Weekly
Greenwood is a compulsively readable, beautifully observed, deeply felt and rich tale that roves across Canadian history and landscape.
Pile by the Bed
Greenwood is a brilliant novel that demonstrates the ghastly effects of treating the environment as a commodity. This really is a novel for our times.
Theresa Smith Writes
[A] timely, moving novel.
Damien Lawardorn, Aurealis
A compulsively readable, beautifully observed, deeply felt and rich tale that roves across Canadian history and landscape.
Robert Goodman, The Blurb
An arresting eco-parable.
Alfred Hickling, The Guardian
An absorbing and original epic.
Dan Shaw, Happy Magazine
There are plenty of visionary moments laced into [Christie’s] shape-shifting narrative … Greenwood penetrates to the core of things.
Michael Upchurch, The New York Times Book Review
[W]ith the expert, deft hands of a seasoned carpenter, author Michael Christie carefully and methodically pieces together a story as intricate as the rings within a tree. The result is a deeply compelling novel of family and memory … Christie creates a sense of poetic, organic symmetry through rich characters and evocative, almost tactile descriptions … [W]hat stands out most by the end is the way in which Christie has been able to evoke and give voice to the way the cumulative effect of time and memory weighs on us all in ways both uplifting and terrifying. Greenwood is a towering, profound novel about the things that endure even as the world seems to be moving on.
Matthew Jackson, Bookpage
[E]ven if you’re suffering from what you might call Literary Tree Fatigue, Christie’s novel is worth reading, in part because it’s a clever mash-up of genres that distinguishes itself from its literary cousins and earns its bulk … broad messages aside, the heart of the novel is a winning and energetic chase story … When do we choose self-preservation, and when do we choose survival in a broader sense? The question has never gone away, but Greenwood closes with the message that it’s increasingly urgent.
Mark Athitakis, The Washington Post
A riveting tale of love, greed, sacrifice and betrayal – and an ode to the beauty of trees.
Nicole Abadee, The Age
Greenwood’s powerful narratives, fascinating characters, and lovely prose full of beautiful specificity, takes on our contemporary fears for the world. This is one of those novels you thrust at friends and insist: You have to read this! FIVE STARS
Wendy Waring, Good Reading
An impressive ecological novel … From the future, to the present, the past and back again, Greenwood is a moving novel of family sacrifice and love for a natural world.
Colin Steele, The Canberra Times
Christie dazzles with this richly woven historical tracking five generations of the ‘trouble-plagued’ Greenwood clan and the environmental devastation wrought by its lucrative timber empire … [A] spellbinding family saga reflecting fiction's intensifying interest in the climate crisis as well as humanity's innate desire to make amends for past wrongs and start anew. STARRED REVIEW
Annalisa Pešek, Library Journal
A celebration of nature. A complex, multigenerational family drama. A fight to save a dying planet. Michael Christie’s Greenwood is these things and more. It’s a transportive story that invites you to commune with nature and understand that our lives are inseparable from the natural world around us.
Eugen Bacon, Aurealis