WJB Book Club
This month, we’re reading Greenwood, by Michael Christie.
Greenwood is a “magnificent generational saga that charts a family’s rise and fall, its secrets and inherited crimes, and the conflicted relationship with the source of its fortune–trees.”
2023 Canada Reads Finalist
Longlisted for the 2019 Giller Prize
SHORTLISTED FOR CANADA READS 2023NATIONAL BESTSELLER, LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE, AND SHORTLISTED FOR THE FOREST OF READING’S EVERGREEN AWARD, THE ETHEL WILSON FICTION PRIZE, AND THE RODERICK HAIG-BROWN REGIONAL PRIZEA magnificent generational saga that charts a family’s rise and fall, its secrets and inherited crimes, and the conflicted relationship with the source of its fortune–trees.They come for the trees. It’s 2038 and Jacinda (Jake) Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide babysitting ultra-rich-eco-tourists in one of the world’s last remaining forests. It’s 2008 and Liam Greenwood is a carpenter, sprawled on his back after a workplace fall and facing the possibility of his own death. It’s 1974 and Willow Greenwood is just out of jail for one of her environmental protests: attempts at atonement for the sins of her father’s once vast and rapacious timber empire. It’s 1934 and Everett Greenwood is a Depression-era drifter who saves an abandoned infant, only to find himself tangled up in the web of a crime, secrets, and betrayal that will cling to his family for decades. And throughout, there are trees: a steady, silent pulse thrumming beneath Christie’s effortless sentences, working as a guiding metaphor for withering, weathering, and survival.Transporting, beautifully written, and brilliantly structured like the nested growth rings of a tree, Greenwood reveals the knot of lies, omissions, and half-truths that exists at the root of every family’s origin story. It is a magnificent novel of greed, sacrifice, love, and the ties that bind–and the hopeful, impossible task of growing toward the light.
If you buy the book with us, you can enjoy 20% off using code BOOKCLUB when purchasing in-store or online. Listed at $22, our Book Club price is $17.60 plus GST.
RSVP so we know how much coffee and snackies to bring!
