North Woods

A yellow house deep in the Massachusetts woods outlasts every family that claims it. Two young lovers flee a Puritan settlement to build a cabin on the land. Their happiness is short, and the tragedy that follows marks the place for everyone who comes after.

An English soldier who fought in the colonial wars gives up soldiering to grow apples on the same ground. Twin sisters later inherit the house and spend their lives divided by rivalry through war and hardship. Generations after that, a crime reporter digs into an old mass grave on the property and finds that the past will not stay buried.

Daniel Mason tells the story in shifting forms, moving between letters, journal entries, court records and plain prose. He hands the narration in turn to a lovelorn painter, a con man, a hunting panther and a beetle. Rather than following one family through time, the novel follows the house itself, and each new resident, human or not, takes up the story in sequence.

The book is literary fiction, told through frequent shifts in narrator and form, and it moves at its own unhurried pace rather than building toward one plot. The National Book Critics Circle named it a 2023 finalist in fiction, and it won the 2024 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award.