Location, location, location. Daniel Mason's gorgeous fifth novel, North Woods, is the story of a place — a yellow house deep in the woods of western Massachusetts — and its motley succession of occupants, human and otherwise, who leave their mark on the property over the course of four centuries.
It all starts with a pair of young lovers who, "casting off their Puritan yokes...absconded to...their private Arcadia," Mason writes. "They had come to the spot in the freshness of June, chased from the village by its people, threading deer path through the forest, the valleys, the fern groves, and the quaking bogs...Gone was England, gone the Colony."
