One house in the western Massachusetts woods, told across four centuries by everyone who passed through it. Two lovers fleeing a Puritan colony. An apple-obsessed English soldier. Twin spinster sisters. A landscape painter, a schizophrenic son, a true crime writer, a beetle, a catamount, and the trees themselves. Mason writes each section in the form of its era — letters, ballads, a case report, a nature almanac — and the ghosts accumulate without ever taking over. It’s a novel about how a piece of ground holds everything that happened on it.
North Woods