DB Outreach – Virtual: Four Seasons Book Club for Adults – North Woods by Daniel Mason

Four Seasons Book Club for Adults

DB’s Outreach team invites you to join the quarterly virtual book club for all adults! Join us for one, two, or as many of the book discussions we offer each year – for the books that capture your interest! 

Join us this Winter: Tuesday, February 11th at 8:30pm ET/ 7:30pm CT / 6:30pm MT / 5:30pm PT

Our featured book this winter is North Woods by Daniel Mason. Find more details on the book and the author below! 

If you are interested in joining us, please email us at [email protected] and we will answer any questions and/or add you to the participant list for this book. The Zoom information for the book discussion will be sent approximately one week before our meeting.

During our discussion, you will be able to share your favorite passages or moments from the book with the group (consider marking them in your book or writing it down along with the page number).

North Woods by Daniel Mason

Watch this 1:30 introduction to the book by the author himself: Daniel Mason introduces North Woods

Book overview:

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?

The Christian Science Monitor named North Woods by Daniel Mason one of the best reads of 2023. The reviewer states, “This dazzling novel intertwines the often tragically truncated lives of its characters and its wooded setting, all gorgeously captured in multiple literary styles, genres, and voices.”

About the Author:

Daniel Mason is a physician and author of The Piano Tuner (2002), A Far Country (2007), The Winter Soldier (2018), A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (2020)–a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize– and North Woods (2023). His work has been translated into 28 languages, awarded a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Piano Tuner was produced as an opera by Music Theatre Wales for the Royal Opera House in London, and adapted to the stage by Lifeline Theatre in Chicago. His short stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, Zoetrope: All Story, Zyzzyva, Narrative, and Lapham’s Quarterly, and have been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a National Magazine Award and an O. Henry Prize.

Hear an 8-minute interview of Daniel Mason by Scott Simon on NPR’s Weekend Edition: click here