Annie Proulx · 2016 · global

Annie Proulx's 2016 novel. Two penniless Frenchmen land in New France in 1693, bound to a seigneur for three years' woodcutting in exchange for land. One stays and marries into a Mi'kmaq family; the other runs, trades furs and founds a timber empire. Three hundred years of their descendants cut their way across North America and out into the world.

1. 1
   La Rochelle

   Rene Sel and Charles Duquet are shipped out of France as indentured woodcutters, sent to subdue a wilderness on behalf of a seigneur who has never seen it, in exchange for land at the end of three years.

2. 2
   Wobik

   They come ashore in New France into mud, mosquitoes and a forest that seems to have no end - and within a day Duquet has understood that the contract is a trap and begun planning to run, while Sel picks up the axe.

3. 3
   Mi'kma'ki

   Sel is married off to Mari, a Mi'kmaq healer, and their children grow up between two peoples and are fully accepted by neither - a line the book follows through three centuries of being pushed steadily off its own ground.

4. 4
   Michigan

   Duquet's descendants build a timber company that moves west as it exhausts each forest in turn, through the white pine of the Great Lakes - an operation that treats an apparently infinite resource exactly as though it were one.

5. 5
   New Zealand

   The company reaches for the kauri forests of New Zealand when the northern stands are gone, and the pattern repeats on the far side of the world - the last chapters arriving in a present with little forest left.