Across the border from Oakfield, Massachusetts, the setting of Daniel Mason''s North Woods , sits the college town of Greensbury, Vermont, where a young family arrives one summer day from California for an idyllic year in the country. There is Miles, a loveable if highly distractible scholar of Russian folktales who has been "working" on his dissertation for fourteen years; Kate, his wife, a superstar English professor whose ambition is fueled by a brush with serious illness (and managing her hapless husband); their fantasy-loving son Wesley; their artist daughter Olive; and their dog, Giuseppe, a truffle-hunting master of excavation in a land with no truffles. Over the course of the year, as Kate introduces her students to the pleasures of Milton and Blake, Miles will make no progress on Russian folktales, but will, through what Kate calls his "capacity to fall in with anyone, anywhere," gain entree into a world with a mystery of its own, a place not only of immense natural beauty and unforgettable neighbors, but also a bizarre, even ridiculous, local legend, which - Miles begins to wonder - might not be a legend after all.

Autorentext
Daniel Mason is a doctor and author of The Piano Tuner (2002), A Far Country (2007), The Winter Soldier (2018), and A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (2020), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His work has been translated into 28 languages, adapted for opera and the stage, and awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His short stories and essays have been awarded two Pushcart Prizes, a National Magazine Award and an O. Henry Prize. He is an assistant professor in the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry. He currently lives in Palo Alto, CA.

Klappentext

🍃 'THE BOOK OF THE SUMMER' Mick Herron 🍃
A GOOD MORNING AMERICA PICK
FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF NORTH WOODS

'I LOVED it'
Naomi Alderman

'LYRICAL and JOYFUL'
Sarah Jessica Parker

'This is, simply put, a JOYFUL book - and the deeper you dig, the more joyful it becomes'
Guardian

'Very FUNNY . . . a PERFECT SUMMER ESCAPE . . . as tasty and oddly shaped as an organic apple'
Financial Times

'Mason deftly delivers larks aplenty, POIGNANCY, gentle satire and some top-tier farce. Be warned that the latter may cause you to spontaneously erupt with mirth in public places. This book DISPELS GLOOM: go for it'
Irish Times

'There's genuine ENCHANTMENT in this earthy tale of city folk transplanted to rural New England . . . It's a WARM and delightfully whimsy free take on fables and family'
Mail on Sunday

'A CHARMING book about ambition, marriage and country living'
Sunday Times Style

'VIRTUOSIC'
R4 Front Row

'One of the FUNNIEST books I've read in a very long time'
Xand van Tulleken

'Told with WARMTH and WIT, Mason's prose shimmers in this immersive ode to stories, to the land, and its people' Lucy Steeds, author of The Artist

'A book to make the world feel a little LIGHTER, a little warmer'
***Ron Charles

Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales and increasingly haunted by a sense that he's become a disappointment to his family.

So when his wife Kate accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the far away forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be the year to finally move forward with his life.

But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, who possesses, in Kate's, words, 'a great capacity to fall in with anyone, anywhere'. Soon he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as those of any of his folktales - from a ghostly tree surgeon, to a scythe-mad biochemist, a Shakespearean temptress, and a photographer of snowflakes - until at last he stumbles upon a bizarre local legend, which, he begins to suspect, might not be a legend at all.

🍃 A FAMILY'S NEW BEGINNING. THE LOCAL'S OLDEST LEGEND. 🍃

Praise for Daniel Mason
'A virtuoso' Mail on Sunday
'Has the born storyteller's gift' Daily Mail
'Genius' Washington Post
'Brave and original' Guardian
'Never fails to surprise and delight' Sunday Times
'Teases out the joy and meaning in the sometimes small lives of his characters' The Times
'Shows us what is possible when a writer lets his hair down' Financial Times