North Woods: A Novel

“I’m not sure I can leave the wood,” he said, when the trees were thinning and the Hall was in sight. “Walk in time,” said Tobias. “Think of your map.” He could see it in his head, Silver’s Hallow Wood, the primaeval forest spilling off the edges of the paper. There was a time three thousand years gone you could have walked from one end of the coun

It strikes her that she envies him. His years of enforced tranquility, the patience of his slowed mind, the expansion of his blinkered senses. He can watch the dozen bare trees in the backyard for hours and see something intricate and surprising, sufficient to his desires, while she—she is still trapped in a hunger that rushes past everything.