David Adams Richards

For years, David Adams Richards has been one of Canada’s most beloved and prized novelists. We became instant believers after reading this tremendous story of a logging family in icy, remote Canada during the mid-twentieth century. This saga is stacked mightily like classical tragedy, and it’s one of the coldest books you’ll ever read, both in its fascinating description of the inclement, treacherous labor and in the treatment of the story’s central characters by the provincial, gossiping villagers. Two brothers, the eldest headstrong and tempestuous, the younger gentle and bookish, inherit the family harvest. The older brother, a kind of mythic lumberjack hero, dies in a tragic accident, leaving the young one, just back and scarred from war, to mount an impossible logging expedition during the bleakest mountain winter. With his ability in doubt and his reputation suffering from an association with the wife of a missing friend, the brother faces an impossible struggle against a damning family prophecy, a cruel local rumor mill, and least of all the grueling weather. Like a wet chill, this book seeps into the bones and sets in, but the warmth of Richards’s writing and the many layers of story make this the best kind of late-night, fireside reading. One of our favorite novels of 2007.

Signed first editions