Greenwood: A Novel

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Winner of Le Prix du Livre de SQY and the 2020 Arthur Ellis Award for Excellence in Canadian Crime Writing
Longlisted for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize
A 2023 Canada Reads Finalist
Shortlisted for the 2020 Forest of Reading Evergreen Award, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize


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.

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.

MICHAEL CHRISTIE is the author of three books, most recently the novel Greenwood, which was an international bestseller, longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, won the Arthur Ellis Award, and has been translated into 10 languages. If I Fall, If I Die, his previous novel, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Kirkus Prize, was selected as a New York Times Editors' Choice Pick, and was on numerous best-of 2015 lists. His linked collection of stories, The Beggar's Garden, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and won the Vancouver Book Award. A former carpenter and homeless shelter worker, he lives in Victoria, British Columbia, the unceded territory of the Lkwungen speaking people, and the Songhees, Esquimalt, and WSÁNEC First Nations.

ISBN: 9780771024481
Format: Paperback
Pages: 512
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: August 25, 2020

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Winner of Le Prix du Livre de SQY and the 2020 Arthur Ellis Award for Excellence in Canadian Crime Writing

Longlisted for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize

A 2023 Canada Reads Finalist

Shortlisted for the 2020 Forest of Reading Evergreen Award, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize