Ask a Bookseller: ‘North Woods’ by Daniel Mason

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now. 

You’ve probably read a multi-generation saga where the story follows a family line through the decades. Have you read a novel that follows … not people, but a house? 

That’s the premise of “North Woods” by Daniel Mason: We focus on a house in the woods of Massachusetts and its occupants — human and animal — over four centuries.

Justin Dickinson of Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kan., calls the work “one of the most unique and original voices in fiction I’ve ever read.” 

The book is broken into 12 chapters, one for each month of the year. Each chapter moves forward in time, and the voice and style of the writing change to suit each new occupant. Through it all, the house and its surrounding land are as much a character in the story as any of the people. 

Justin describes a few of the characters who occupy the house: 

“We start out with a Puritan couple that’s escaping their colony that they were kind of chased away from, and they build the cabin for a shelter. And then it kind of jumps immediately ahead to a man who finds the grounds outside can grow a very unique kind of apple, and he becomes very obsessed with making it into the next, best orchard. So you follow his journey for a little bit. You get his daughters, who have so much going on; they're crazy and hysterical.

There’s ghosts. You get a mountain lion that comes through at one point. And that’s a very interesting poem. There’s a beetle sitting in the rafters at one point watching a couple getting intimate, and then the beetle itself gets a little bit intimate.

It’s so wild and interesting, and every chapter will just kind of keep you on your toes.”