{"product_id":"barkskins-pb-annie-proulx-9780007232017","title":"BARKSKINS PB","description":"LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017NOW A MAJOR TELEVISION SERIESFrom Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain, comes her masterwork: an epic, dazzling, violent, magnificently dramatic novel about the taking down of the world’s forests.In the late seventeenth century two penniless young Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord, a “seigneur,” for three years in exchange for land, they become wood-cutters – barkskins. René suffers extraordinary hardship, oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He is forced to marry a Mi’kmaw woman and their descendants live trapped between two inimical cultures. But Duquet, crafty and ruthless, runs away from the seigneur, becomes a fur trader, then sets up a timber business. Proulx tells the stories of the descendants of Sel and Duquet over three hundred years – their travels across North America, to Europe, China, and New Zealand, under stunningly brutal conditions; the revenge of rivals; accidents; pestilence; Indian attacks; and cultural annihilation. Over and over again, they seize what they can of a presumed infinite resource, leaving the modern-day characters face to face with possible ecological collapse.Proulx’s inimitable genius is her creation of characters who are so vivid – in their greed, lust, vengefulness, or their simple compassion and hope – that we follow them with fierce attention. Annie Proulx is one of the most formidable and compelling American writers, and Barkskins is her greatest novel, a magnificent marriage of history and imagination.","brand":"HarperCollins Publishers","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49760979714336,"sku":"9780007232017","price":14.44,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0753\/2812\/7264\/files\/9780007232017.jpg?v=1785322360","url":"https:\/\/bookcorner.com\/products\/barkskins-pb-annie-proulx-9780007232017","provider":"The Book Corner","version":"1.0","type":"link"}