"North Woods," by Daniel Mason

This novel has been nominated for a number of literary awards and been featured on quite a few top-reads lists. It's also considered as one of the best recently released audiobooks. The San Francisco Chronicle provides this summation for your consideration: “With the expansiveness and immersive feeling of two-time Booker Prize nominee David Mitchell’s fiction (Cloud Atlas), the wicked creepiness of Edgar Allan Poe, and Mason’s bone-deep knowledge of and appreciation for the natural world that’s on par with that of Thoreau, North Woods fires on all cylinders.” Is there something here for pretty much everyone? Let's find out and discuss!

Regarding our location, if you need some extra landmark help, find your way to Belvedere Castle. Behind it you'll find two staircases diverging past fenced-in outdoor equipment. Take the left staircase, and keep bearing to the left when you get to the bottom of it.

Feel free to bring a blanket, chair, water, snacks, your friendly dog.

From Goodreads:

A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries—a daring, moving tale of memory and fate from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier.

When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become home to an extraordinary succession of inhabitants . An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins survive war and famine, only to succumb to envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths a mass grave, but finds the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle; as each one confronts the mysteries of the north woods, they come to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.

Traversing cycles of history, nature, and even literature, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment and to one another, across time, language and space. Written along with the seasons and divided into the twelve months of the year, it is an unforgettable novel about secrets and fates that asks the timeless how do we live on, even after we’re gone?