AUDIOBOOK
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Finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Best Novel
A New York Times Notable Book
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and "Brokeback Mountain," comes the New York Times bestselling epic about the demise of the world's forests: Barkskins is grand entertainment in the tradition of Dickens and Tolstoy... the crowning achievement of Annie Proulx's prominent career, also perhaps the greatest environmental novel ever written.
In the late seventeenth century two young Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord 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 native woman and their descendants live trapped between two cultures. But Duquet runs away, becomes a fur trader, then sets up a timber business. Annie 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-the revenge of rivals, accidents, pestilence, Indian attacks, and cultural annihilation. Over and over, they seize what they can of a presumed infinite resource, leaving the modern-day characters face to face with possible ecological collapse.
Barkskins showcases Proulx's inimitable genius of creating characters who are so vivid that we follow them with fierce attention.
A New York Times Notable Book
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and "Brokeback Mountain," comes the New York Times bestselling epic about the demise of the world's forests: Barkskins is grand entertainment in the tradition of Dickens and Tolstoy... the crowning achievement of Annie Proulx's prominent career, also perhaps the greatest environmental novel ever written.
In the late seventeenth century two young Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord 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 native woman and their descendants live trapped between two cultures. But Duquet runs away, becomes a fur trader, then sets up a timber business. Annie 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-the revenge of rivals, accidents, pestilence, Indian attacks, and cultural annihilation. Over and over, they seize what they can of a presumed infinite resource, leaving the modern-day characters face to face with possible ecological collapse.
Barkskins showcases Proulx's inimitable genius of creating characters who are so vivid that we follow them with fierce attention.