“A stunning, bracing, full-tilt ride through three hundred years of US and Canadian history… with the type of full-immersion plot that keeps you curled in your chair, reluctant to stop reading” (Elle),BarkskinsshowcasesAnnie Proulx’sinimitable genius of creating characters who are so vivid that we follow them with fierce attention."Monumental. [With] prose of directness, clarity, rhythmic power and oaken solidity. . . Barkskins is a potently imagined chronicle of mankind’s dealings with the North American forests."-The Wall Street JournalIn 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, and then sets up a timber business."Proulx establishes in Barkskins a narrative so grand in spatial and temporal scope, so broad in theme, that it cannot conceivably be strictly American. Her pitch-perfect sentences, instead, encompass the entire Western world, and its ever-growing concern with ecological and environmental change."-Jeffrey Zuckerman, The New RepublicAnnie Proulxtells 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.Finalist for the 2016 Kirkus Prize For Fictio