Greenwood

'Time is not an arrow. Neither is it a road. It goes in no particular direction. It simply accumulates - in the body, in the world - like wood does. Layer upon layer. Light then dark. Each one dependent upon the last. Each year impossible without the one preceding it. Each triumph and each disaster written forever in its structure.'

This remarkable novel, structured like the rings of a tree, travels from a futuristic world in which barely any forests remain to the start of the twentieth century, where two young boys survive a train crash, setting them on a path that will change their lives. Moving from the future to the present to the past, and back again, this magnificent generational saga tells the story of one family and their enduring connection to the place that brought them together.

This book is why we read books. Why we need books. Wildly inventive, structurally elegant, deeply felt, and so very wise. Greenwood is Michael Christie's best work ever, and that's saying something.
- Alexander MacLeod, author of Light Lifting

Greenwood is brilliant. Michael Christie shows a cross section of one family's history, revealing their dark secrets, loves, losses, and the mark of an accident still visible four generations later. Year by year, page by page, the layers of this intricate and elegant novel build into an epic story that is completely absorbing. I had to cancel everything for this book because I couldn't stop reading.
- Claire Cameron, author of The Last Neanderthal

Ingeniously structured and with prose as smooth as beech bark, Michael Christie's Greenwood is as compulsive as it is profound. A sweeping intergenerational saga that explores trees and their roots, from the precious evergreens that become commodities in the entertainment business of the future, to the intricately tangled trees of family - all of it is dazzlingly delivered in a framework inspired by the actual growth rings of a tree. Every one of Greenwood's characters burrowed their way into my heart. Beguilingly brilliant, timely, and utterly engrossing, Greenwood is one of my favourite reads in recent memory.
- Kira Jane Buxton, author of Hollow Kingdom