Greenwood opens on a near future that is all too believable – a global forest dieback (the Withering), the dusts it engenders, and the new TB strain it fosters.

Onto this dark stage walks Jacinda Greenwood, aka Jake, a debt-ridden dendrologist working in 2038 off the west coast of Canada for an exclusive island resort that boasts one of the last old-growth forests. An old flame shows up offering information on a legacy that catapults us back through Jake’s astounding family history.

We move through the saga, through the rings of family story back to the heartwood of 1908 and her foundling ancestors, and discover her genealogy is more forest than family tree. Humans and forests are one, a recurring metaphor that makes Christie’s prose engagingly lyrical but never overwhelms Greenwood’s narrative drive.

We meet Harris and Everett Greenwood, a blind lumber tycoon, and a war-gutted hobo, who started out as boys found in train wreckage and raised by a small town and a woodlot; Willow Greenwood, the abandoned infant who grows into a direct-action forest conservationist; her son, Liam, who becomes a master carpenter, and finally Jake. They are beautifully flawed battlers pushing on through astonishing hardships.

Despite the bleak near-future framing story, the characters, each of whom just will not quit, leave you hopeful. Greenwood’s powerful narratives, fascinating characters, and lovely prose full of beautiful specificity, takes on our contemporary fears for the world.

This is one of those novels you thrust at friends and insist: You have to read this!

Reviewed by Wendy Waring