Greenwood

2038

THE GREENWOOD

ARBOREAL CATHEDRAL

They come for the trees.

To smell their needles. To caress their bark. To be regenerated in the humbling loom of their shadows. To stand mutely in their leafy churches and pray to their thousand-year-old souls.

From the world s dust-choked cities they venture to this exclusive arboreal resort a remote forested island off the Pacific Rim of British Columbia to be transformed, renewed, and reconnected. To be reminded that the Earth s once-thundering green heart has not flatlined, that the soul of all living things has not come to dust and that it isn t too late and that all is not lost. They come here to the Greenwood Arboreal Cathedral to ingest this outrageous lie, and it s Jake Greenwood s job as Forest Guide to spoon-feed it to them.

God s Middle Finger

As first light trickles through the branches, Jake greets this morning s group of Pilgrims at the trailhead. Today, she ll lead them out among the sky-high spires of Douglas fir and Western red cedar, between granite outcrops plush with electric green moss, to the old-growth trees, where epiphany awaits. Given the forecasted rain, the dozen Pilgrims are all swaddled in complimentary Leafskin, the shimmery yet breathable new fabric that s replaced Gore-Tex, nano-engineered to mimic the way leaves bead and repel water. Though the Cathedral has issued Jake her own Leafskin jacket, she seldom wears it for fear of damaging company property; she s already deep enough in debt without having to worry about a costly replacement. Yet trudging through the drizzling rain that begins just after they set out on the trail, Jake wishes she d made an exception today.

Despite the liter of ink-black coffee she gulped before work this morning, Jake s hungover brain is taffy-like, and it throbs in painful synchronization with every step she takes. Though she s woefully unprepared for public speaking, once they reach the first glades of old-growth she begins her usual

Michael Christie is the author of the novel If I Fall, If I Die, which was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Kirkus Prize and selected as a New York Times Editors Choice. His linked collection of stories, The Beggar s Garden, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize, and won the City of Vancouver Book Award. His essays and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Globe and Mail. A former carpenter and homeless-shelter worker, Christie divides his time between Victoria and Galiano Island, British Columbia, where he lives with his wife and two sons in a timber-frame house that he built himself.

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

Christie skillfully teases out the details in a page-turner of a saga that complements sylvan books such as Sometimes a Great Notion and The Overstory, one that closes with Jake s realization that, tangled lineage and all, a family is less a tree than a collection of individuals pooling their resources through intertwined roots.  Beguilingly structured, elegantly written: ecoapocalyptic but with hope that somehow we ll make it. Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

A rugged, riveting novel . . . This superb family saga will satisfy fans of Richard Powers s The Overstory while offering a convincing vision of potential ecological destruction. Publishers Weekly (starred review)