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.

Barkskins

Barkskins by Annie Proulx, 717 pages.

Starting in 1693, when two Frenchmen meet in the not-yet Canadian settlement of Wobik, where mosquitoes "covered their hands and necks like fur,"both of them "engaged" as indentured servants to Claude Trepagny, Barkskins follows two related families down to the present time. The descendants of Rene Sel, the man who stayed and worked the land with Trepagny, tended  to lead harder lives; theirs were frequently the more violent deaths, sometimes far off in the vast forests, but just as often nearer to home and family, and at the hands of the white immigrants who were claiming the Canadian and northern Maine lands as their own. And, unlike the prosperous Duke family, what possessions the Sels acquired in life were prone to disappear. Like the Dukes, the descendants of Sel traveled far in search of new forest or in trying to connect to older, vanishing lifestyles. They were French with lots of Mi'kmaq Indian, until down through the generations the French was forgotten, and only the Mi'kmaq memories remained,
The descendants of Charles Duquet (later Duke), the man who ran from his contract, see their fortunes rise and fall over the decades. They are more avaricious, less bothered by scruples, often far richer, but never that much happier.
This stunning epic recounts travels to China, Europe, and to New Zealand as the descendantsof Sel and Duquet try to find new markets. old traditions, or new forests. Travel often ends badly for the character involved, though few of their family members learn that lesson. And it takes generations to learn that nothing, not the vast forests of North America, New Zealand, or South America, and not the largest fortune can last. A big, beautiful book. Reads far more quickly than any other 700 pager.
This has to be one of the best of 2016.