LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017 A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR
From Annie Proulx the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and Brokeback
Mountain comes her masterwork: an epic dazzling violent magnificently dramatic novel about
the taking down of the world's forests. In the late seventeenth century two penniless young
Frenchmen René Sel and Charles Duquet arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord a
"seigneur " for three years in exchange for land they become wood-cutters - barkskins. René
suffers extraordinary hardship oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He is
forced to marry a Mi'kmaw woman and their descendants live trapped between two inimical
cultures. But Duquet crafty and ruthless runs away from the seigneur becomes a fur trader
then sets up a timber business. Proulx tells the stories of the descendants of Sel and Duquet
over three hundred years - their travels across North America to Europe China and New
Zealand under stunningly brutal conditions the revenge of rivals accidents pestilence
Indian attacks and cultural annihilation. Over and over again they seize what they can of a
presumed infinite resource leaving the modern-day characters face to face with possible
ecological collapse. Proulx's inimitable genius is her creation of characters who are so vivid
- in their greed lust vengefulness or their simple compassion and hope - that we follow them
with fierce attention. Annie Proulx is one of the most formidable and compelling American
writers and Barkskins is her greatest novel a magnificent marriage of history and
imagination.
