Barkskins : Longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2017

LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017 NOW A MAJOR TELEVISION SERIES From Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain, comes her masterwork: an epic, dazzling, violent, magnificently dramatic novel about the taking down of the world’s forests. In the late seventeenth century two penniless young Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France.Bound to a feudal lord, a “seigneur,” 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 Mi’kmaw woman and their descendants live trapped between two inimical cultures.But Duquet, crafty and ruthless, runs away from the seigneur, becomes a fur trader, then sets up a timber business.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, under stunningly brutal conditions; the revenge of rivals; accidents; pestilence; Indian attacks; and cultural annihilation.Over and over again, they seize what they can of a presumed infinite resource, leaving the modern-day characters face to face with possible ecological collapse. Proulx’s inimitable genius is her creation of characters who are so vivid – in their greed, lust, vengefulness, or their simple compassion and hope – that we follow them with fierce attention.Annie Proulx is one of the most formidable and compelling American writers, and Barkskins is her greatest novel, a magnificent marriage of history and imagination.