This novel is so remarkable and it left me stunned by its beauty. A book, I suppose you could say, with a plot. There is no main character, no villain. What we have is a house and a wood/forest that we watch for 400 years. It is the history of the land, the house. We have snapshots of some of those who pass through, who inhabit the land, the house, from a pair of spinster twins to a crime writer; from a squirrel to a lusty beetle! We have their stories and we also have illustrations and folk ballads. This is a book that weaves the stories of people and nature together and you see the interconnectedness of everything. The nature writing is sublime - so evocative. There is everything you could possibly want within these pages, art, sex, beauty, supernatural, we even drop into a dystopian landscape. You will go through a whole range of emotions as you read about those that rest upon this plot of land - I loved the sisters' story and the final story amazed me. And as for the last line .... I just don't have to words.

‘North Woods’ is a beautifully constructed novel. Set in New England, it pays tribute to the power and endurance of the natural world, the imaginings and creativity of men and women, and the hopes and dreams that people have in common through the ages.
Daniel Mason is incredibly skilled in capturing his characters’ personalities through their voices as well as through their actions. Whilst he focuses on a singular place, all the people who inhabit it are memorable for their unique relationships with the surroundings and the echoes they leave as we are led through the centuries. A wonderful, poetical read which celebrates what it means to be human.
My thanks to NetGalley and John Murray Press for a copy of this book in exchange for a fair review.

Flipping heck! I’m just readjusting from being pulled sideways through a literary undergrowth. North Woods is the reason why I’m bleary-eyed today after havinghavinghaving to finish reading this story.
A story about a yellow house through the centuries. Simple as. But so not. “Everything but the kitchen sink” doesn’t even come near the complexity and richness of this plot, its winding of multiple tendrils like some long-forgotten bindweed and its intertwining looping storylines that will at times necessitate the use of a notepad.
It is a ghost story of sorts, but subtle in its eerieness of atmospheric poetry. I won’t spoiler the plot, it really needs to be discovered and savoured by the reader.
Simply enchanting!

North Woods is an amazing book with such a wealth of wonderful characters who I am sure I will remember for a long time. The writing is excellent with brilliant descriptions of the flora and fauna. Tree stumps wearing mossy stockings was my favourite. And the lusty beetle was a great inclusion. Highly recommended.

This is the best book I have read in a long time. It is a beautiful tale of a house, it’s inhabitants and its surroundings over roughly 200 years. It is told almost in a series of short stories that interlink and which are punctuated by images, poems and songs. Even the insect life are given a voice as they spread seeds and viruses that shape the surrounding area. The writing is exquisite and I didn’t want the book to come to an end!

Several different stories but all inextricably linked by an old, sometime crumbling, yellow house deep within a wood. All of their stories are different but somehow it feels like a character from one story, will show up in someone else’s tale.
The very last story eventually gives a hint of other-worldliness and death transcending from one story’s era to another. Characters meeting who really wouldn’t have if they were in their own story’s timeline.
There is something eerie about this book and its strange collection of tales and it will not let you go. The book will draw you in and make you a part of the ongoing history of the yellow house in the wood. So beware when you step inside ….. and you will step inside.

What a clever book! Daniel Mason tells the history of modern America from the early settlers to the present and even a dip into the future. Short chapters capture a moment in time for a range of characters as the clock ticks away the years on the same small patch of land. Understated and beautiful.

I could review this book in a short sentence as being dreadfully dull and disconnected but i will try to give more of a sense of the book. The author has attempted to tell the story of a place across time by using the people who occupied a single cabin in the woods. As the reader there were sections that i really got into the narrative and that were in some sense evocative. BUT what was he doing with the pages and pages of medical notes about a patient who might benefit from some procedure to cure his psychosis? JUST WHAT was the relevance of the sex life of a beetle? How were the songs and poems related to anything?

Weaving among the here and now was the spectral beyond and I quite liked the ghostly doings I think perhaps this could have had greater influence on the narrative. For me it was just too disconnected. There were too many instances where I wondered where we had gone to and more importantly why. The author tried to create something different but failed to pull it off.He is not an author I will be looking to follow

A wonderfully imaginative and compelling book. I found it hard to get into at first, but then couldn't put it down. An unusual book, which the author carries off very well - I will definitely recommend it.

A beautiful, lyrical tale over centuries of a house in rural New England. Very dense, very descriptive, almost poetry, man and nature intertwined.

The 400-year history of a house in the woods of New England, told through its many inhabitants..

A greenfingered soldier, a lovelorn artist, a crime reporter, an elm bark beetle. The human and non-human cast of characters in North Woods show how we are interconnected with each other and with the Earth.

Mason's writing is full of humanity and wonder of nature.

Inventive, mystical and beautifully written.

My thanks to NetGalley and Penguin for the ARC.

Quite an amazing novel. The history of a house, a place with the people almost playing second fiddle.

This is a wonderful imagined history of a home in the New England woods. It describes the first house and its origins, taking us through the centuries. We experience love and hatred, fear, madness, solitude, sadness, deep joy. Through all the human emotions there is the land and the changes wrought to the natural world. Of course no book set in that part of the world could miss out the changes the climate and disease have brought about.

The book itself reminded me of Richard Powers "Overstory" but was far more accessible, giving us a much more personal history through the ages.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it to history or natural history buffs or those who simply love a good saga. The book almost divides itself into short stories that follow a particular family this making it easy to read and follow through the years.

Thanks to Netgalley for the advance review copy.

North Woods is an unexpected, surprising, unusual, curious novel. It is all of these things, because it doesn't conform to any of the typical criteria normally associated with novel-writing, in terms of structure and plot.If it were an artwork, it might be referred to as a 'collage' which, by definition, is of a fragmentary nature, a blending or juxtapositioning of different elements. Mason does the literary equivalent. He uses vignettes, poetry and epistolary to tell the story of a single house in a remote part of Massachusetts and the people who live there — some only very briefly, others almost their whole lives, others again, for just a few years. The reader learns how the various inhabitants alter the house to accommodate their individual needs, how they feel about its location, the climate and landscape that is very different from the places they have known before.

Much of Mason's writing is almost poetic and quite moving, but there are a few sections which are rather dry and a little heavy-going. Mostly these occur when the author attempts too hard to convey a sense of period through his writing. Arguably, he might have been better off leaving the context of the story to speak for itself, but that is a small niggle. On the whole, I'd recommend this novel for the unique way in which the author tells an unusual story.

Many thanks to the publishers and to Netgalley for the ARC.

This novel follows the inhabitants of a cabin in the woods in the USA over several hundred years, with all their passions, secrets and changes of fortune. It is very intricately written and obviously very well researched. Unfortunately I found the style, which is designed to be authentic for the times, very dense and hard to engage with, as though I was reading original works of the time, and I could not get interested in the story, so I gave up and did not finish.

Filled my messy heart with joy

What an extraordinary spider’s web of a book this is

Danial Mason has written a remarkably unlinear – whilst still being sequential, history of a small piece of New England

Told through many voices, ostensibly beginning at some point after Dissenters first came to set up colonies in America, and ending at some undated future time, this is a history not only of humanity, but of trees, bears, birds, wild cats, lusty beetles, seeds, fungal spores, buildings, apples . Not only all that lives, but also, of all that has lived.

Though each ‘story’ starts afresh, the past increasingly imprints on the present, through the corporality of our lives, the objects we surround ourselves with, the histories they hold.

The sense of everything seeping out of nice tidy boundaries, beginnings and endings is intensified by the fact that these stories of different people inhabiting a constantly extending house in a remote and forested place, are broken up by illustrations, line drawings, folk songs which seem to be telling the stories of characters we met earlier – and indeed, may be coming from ‘beyond the veil’ Boundaries between the living and the dead grow both thin and vibrant.

Reading this rather felt like discovering some rather beautiful, but perhaps dusty, a bit battered, piece of furniture in some junk shop or car boot sale. On taking it home and cleaning it up, it turns out to be something astonishing, containing secret drawers, which open to reveal other boxes, in fact a nest of boxes. Each opened secret reveals more.

I fell into the rabbit hole of Mason’s glorious, beautiful book and can only urge prospective readers that you need to make your own absorbed, enchanting, enchanted journey.

I would not want to spoil it by telling you who and what you will meet.

This is history, geography, cultural history, horticulture, apples, sheep, an exploration of painting, poetry, music, love both romantic and familial, death, and glorious eccentricity. And quite a lot of joyful and abandoned sex. In rather surprising encounters!

It is the first time I have come across Daniel Mason, and I’m delighted there is a back catalogue to explore. I received this as a digital ARC. I think the wood book will be a particular joy, for the illustrations

4.5 stars rounded down to 4 stars.

A mosaic of beautiful story telling. Each character's story builds to an inspiring whole that reminds us of the very short time we are on this earth.

I found the opening some what disorientating and if I hadn't read the blurb - and known I was dealing with two runaway Puritan's - I would have been quite lost. The style changes dramatically and convincingly between characters as the setting in time and the characters themselves are so different. I thought this was particularly well done. It did mean I preferred some sections to others.

Overall, I enjoyed it but it hasn't made its way on to my Top Ten for the year.

Thank you to NetGalley for proving me with an ARC of North Woods.

A dizzying account of man’s connection to the natural world, successes, disappointments, life and death in a rural part of New England and the people who pass through it over the centuries. It is spell binding and astonishing in its scope, surprising in its plot lines and beautiful in its telling. There are some lovely passages on the local habitat, and some very clever connections to the past and various personal histories. I was sometimes confused when picking the story up as to who the current protagonist was, which was not that irritating, but challenging and also fun when connections to the past were explored. On the whole I loved it, and am full of admiration for the author’s imagination, and managing to hold it all together. A splendid, monumental achievement really.

Lovely, literary prose that simultaneously manages to ground and immerse the reader in a single physical setting while weaving together multiple different character arcs and human stories.

Wow what a book thank you ever so much for the opportunity to review. I could not put it down. Would definitely recommend to others!

Daniel Mason's North Woods explores the cycles of life and death and the interconnectedness of past and present. This dazzling novel could be seen as a book of short stories but that does it a disservice and it is most impactful viewed as a whole. One of the aspects that make the novel so compelling is that is not clear at times how past and present are connected which makes this quite a suspenseful engaging read. I appreciated the humorous aspects to the novel and admired how the author captured the voices of so many different characters and times. The weaving of the dead and nature into the story as characters was very effective and served to reinforce the idea of connectedness. Readers of Ian McEwan may like this book.