Description: "It's 2034 and Jake Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide babysitting ultra-rich vacationers in one of the world's last remaining forests. It's 2008 and Liam Greenwood is a carpenter, fallen from a ladder and sprawled on his broken back, calling out from the concrete floor of an empty mansion. It's 1974 and Willow Greenwood is out of jail, free after being locked up for one of her endless series of environmental protests: attempts at atonement for the sins of her father's once vast and violent timber empire. It's 1934 and Everett Greenwood is alone, as usual, in his maple syrup camp squat when he hears the cries of an abandoned infant and gets tangled up in the web of a crime that will cling to his family for decades. And throughout, there are trees: thrumming a steady, silent pulse beneath Christie's effortless sentences and working as a guiding metaphor for withering, weathering, and survival. A shining, intricate clockwork of a novel, Greenwood is a rain-soaked and sun-dappled story of the bonds and breaking points of money and love, wood and blood--and the hopeful, impossible task of growing toward the light"--
Review Quotes: "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)