North Woods by Daniel Mason

Here is the thing that I missed about this book before I read it--the author wrote a book 20 years ago, The Piano Tuner, a historical novel set in Burma, that was breathtaking for the first 3/4 of the book. The ending was disappointing, but there was so much going on in the book, the author showed so much promise. After seeing Amy Bloom talk about the act of writing and describing how difficult it is for her to end a book and how sick of the whole thing she is by the end, I forgive a weak ending pretty quickly, and yet I forgot all about this promising writer. Fast forward twenty years and he has a book the New York Times thought was one of the 5 best works of fiction published in 2023. This book has an historical eye as well. It is set in a New England cabin where we follow the place over the people and animals that inhabit it. The location is probably Maine, which at the beginning of this book was part of Massachusetts; the cabin that two escapees from a Puritan colony and goes forward from there. The non-human characters are 100% early New England, from catamounts to the apple trees, and the people demonstrate that it is in fact true that we do not heed the lessons of history, and it therefore inevitably repeats itself.