From the Pulitzer Prize���winning author of The Shipping News and �Brokeback Mountain,� comes the New York Times bestselling epic about the demise of the world�s forests: �Barkskins is grand entertainment in the tradition of Dickens and Tolstoy�the crowning achievement of Annie Proulx�s distinguished career, but also perhaps the greatest environmental novel ever written� (San Francisco Chronicle).

In the late seventeenth century two penniless young Frenchmen, Ren� 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. Ren� 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, then sets up a timber business. Proulx tells 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.

Proulx�s inimitable genius is her creation of characters who are so vivid�in their greed, lust, vengefulness, or their simple compassion and hope�that we follow them with fierce attention. Annie Proulx is one of the most formidable and compelling American writers, and Barkskins is her greatest novel, a magnificent marriage of history and imagination.