The Woods explores the lives of people in a small Vermont college town
and its surrounding areas--a place at the edge of the bucolic, where the
land begins to shift into something untamed. In the tradition of
Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge and Sherwood Anderson's
Winesburg, Ohio, these stories follow people who carry private griefs
but search for contentment. As they try to make sense of their worlds,
grappling with problems--worried about their careers, their marriages,
their children, their ambitions--they also sift through the happiness
they have, and often find deep solace in the landscape.
What do we find in the woods? An uplifting of spirit or a quieting of
sorrow. A sense of being haunted by the past. Sometimes rougher, more
violent things: abandoned quarries and feral cats, black bears, brothers
caught up in an escalating war, a ghost who wishes to pass on her
despair, monsters who boom with hollow ecstatic laughter. But also
songbirds: the hermit thrush and the winter wren. Rushing rivers glossy
with froth. A nineteenth-century inn that's somehow gotten by all these
years. And far within, a vegetal twilight and constant dusk that feels
outside of time. This remarkable debut illuminates the ways we all carry
within ourselves aspects stark, beautiful, wild, and unknowable.
