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

Proulx, Annie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007579322 ISBN 13: 9780007579327

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2016

Synopsis

LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR

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.

About this title

Review:

‘An ambitious novel of extraordinary power that deserves to win the biggest literary prizes and confirms Proulx as a more gifted writer than many of those deemed “great American Novelists” ***** Sunday Express

‘Magnificent ... might be her best book yet’ Anthony Doerr

‘Wonderful ... A huge and brilliant novel, which takes us back to the uncompromising splendour of the natural world, and affirms Proulx’s reputation as one of the greatest and toughest prose stylists writing today’ TLS

‘Truly compelling ... I quickly devoured it ... Barkskins stays with you’ Stylist

‘An enthralling story ... Forest ecology, indigenous culture, sea voyages, Dutch culture, colonial and Maori culture, the logging industry: all these subjects and many more are revealed through the adventures of her characters’ New Statesman

‘Proulx’s commanding epic about the annihilation of our forests is nothing less than a sylvan Moby-Dick ... Proulx’s commanding, perspective-altering epic will be momentous’ Booklist

‘Many of the fine qualities we have come to look for and expect in Proulx’s writing are in evidence in Barkskins. There is comedy, grotesquery and quirkiness mixed in with startling moments of sadness and suffering ... This is a big, ambitious novel that offers a new and cleverly indirect way of thinking about American history’ Financial Times

‘The pacing of her narrative, with each generation reflecting the further depredations of man against nature, its impact on the indigenous population and the twists and turns of colonial power, delivers a slowly gathering power, accented with the dread of irrevocable change’ Guardian, Book of The Week

‘Such is the magnetism of Proulx’s narrative that there’s no resisting her thundering cascade of stories’ Washington Post

‘Deeply rewarding’ Good Housekeeping

From the Author:

E. Annie Proulx was born on 22 August 1935 in Connecticut USA, the state where her mother’s family of farmers, mill workers, inventors and artists have lived since 1635, but has spent most of her life in Vermont. She is the eldest of five girls. Proulx recounts her young life as follows. ‘I briefly attended Colby College in Waterville, Maine in the early 1950s, left to experience two terrible marriages, New York City, the Far East and single-mother-with-two-children poverty.’ In 1963 she went back to school and studied history at the University of Vermont from 1966-69, graduating cum laude. She then went on to take an MA before beginning work on a doctorate. In 1975 she abandoned her doctoral thesis and started work as a freelance journalist. During this time she lived with a friend in a shack in rural Canaan on the Canadian border, in ‘brutally poor circumstances’. As she recalls, ‘compensation were silence and good fishing. From 1975 to 1988 I wrote articles on weather, apples, canoeing, mountain lions, mice, cuisine, libraries, African beadwork, cider and lettuces for dozens of magazines. Payments were usually late and small. It was a miserable way to make a living’. Whenever she could squeeze in the time she wrote stories, averaging about two a year. In recent years grants from the Vermont Council of the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and a Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation as well as publishers’ advances, have enabled her to devote her time to writing. She has three sons. Her interests include cooking, music, wine, fly-fishing, good conversation, canoeing, camping, bird hunting, gardening, landscape work, carpentry, painting, homemade bread, knots and wood-lore. She describes herself as an ‘omnivorous reader, happy with a mining journal or a speed-boat-freak-mag if nothing else is available’. She likes the cold and snow, sharp seasonal changes and weather extremes. E. Annie Proulx wrote her first novel, Postcards, in her fifties and followed it with The Shipping News, which won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the US National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1994. In April 1998 she was presented with the US National Magazine Award for excellence in Fiction. She is also the author of a short-story collection, Heart Songs (Fourth Estate 1994). Accordion Crimes, was published by Fourth Estate in October 1996, and was followed by the publication of Brokeback Mountain, a short story which was published alone in October 1998. Close Range, a collection of short stories (which includes Brokeback Mountain) was published in June 1999.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0007579322
• ISBN 13: 9780007579327
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 736