Barkskins: a Novel / Annie Proulx, 717 pp.

This is a big 'wow' of a novel, drawing a line from the early point of contact between French colonists and native peoples in what is now Nova Scotia through the present, in a story that spreads over North America, Europe, Brazil, and New Zealand. Rene Sel and Charles Duquet come to the wilds of Canada as indentured servants to cut trees and tame the forest.  Like two seeds blown on the wind, these two very different men produce descendants who interact with the forest and native peoples, impacting their ecosystem in divergent, frequently tragic, ways.

The trees are the thing here, though.  Seemingly infinite at the point of first European contact, they are slashed and burned throughout the centuries until no one can deny that they are finite and failing.  Proulx brings an amazing amount of knowledge of trees and the technology used over the centuries to destroy them.  Add to that the prodigious research into the history and language of the Mi'kmaq people and the reader understands this particular slice of Native American and European contact in a way that feels like lived experience.

Proulx is so artful - by gliding over hundreds of years of human narrative with both economy and deep detail, she manages to scale individual human life in relation to that of trees that have endured for millennia.  The art is that the reader just knows she's reading an engrossing story.