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Title details for Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson - Wait list

Damnation Spring

by Ash Davidson
CJ Wilson
Audiobook
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks
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0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks
NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Named a Best Book of 2021 by Newsweek, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times

"A glorious book—an assured novel that's gorgeously told." —The New York Times Book Review
"An incredibly moving epic about an unforgettable family." —CBS Sunday Morning
"[An] absorbing novel...I felt both grateful to have known these people and bereft at the prospect of leaving them behind." —The Washington Post

A stunning novel about love, work, and marriage that asks how far one family and one community will go to protect their future.
Colleen and Rich Gundersen are raising their young son, Chub, on the rugged California coast. It's 1977, and life in this Pacific Northwest logging town isn't what it used to be. For generations, the community has lived and breathed timber; now that way of life is threatened.

Colleen is an amateur midwife. Rich is a tree-topper. It's a dangerous job that requires him to scale trees hundreds of feet tall—a job that both his father and grandfather died doing. Colleen and Rich want a better life for their son—and they take steps to assure their future. Rich secretly spends their savings on a swath of ancient redwoods. But when Colleen, grieving the loss of a recent pregnancy and desperate to have a second child, challenges the logging company's use of the herbicides she believes are responsible for the many miscarriages in the community, Colleen and Rich find themselves on opposite sides of a budding conflict. As tensions in the town rise, they threaten the very thing the Gundersens are trying to protect: their family.

Told in prose as clear as a spring-fed creek, Damnation Spring is an intimate, compassionate portrait of a family whose bonds are tested and a community clinging to a vanishing way of life. An extraordinary story of the transcendent, enduring power of love—between husband and wife, mother and child, and longtime neighbors. An essential novel for our times.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    August 3, 2021

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781797124667
      • File size: 450881 KB
      • Duration: 15:39:20

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 28, 2021
      Davidson’s impressive debut chronicles life in a working-class community so thoroughly that the reader feels the characters’ anguish as they’re divided over environmental concerns that threaten their lives and livelihoods. The tale unfolds between 1977 and 1978 and follows the Gundersen family: husband and wife Rich and Colleen; and their kindergartner son, Chub. Rich is a fourth-generation logger who dreams of a less financially burdensome future for his family when, without telling Colleen, he plunks down their savings to buy a ridge near their home in Northern California with a harvestable forest of primordial redwoods. Meanwhile Colleen—who has suffered eight miscarriages before and after Chub’s birth and who, as the local midwife, has witnessed a disturbing number of defective births—is listening to an environmentalist friend’s warning that the defoliants used by the timber company that employs Rich are leaching lethal toxins into the local water supply. Davidson mirrors the tension between Rich and Colleen with empathetic descriptions of the struggles of their neighbors, many of whom cling desperately to their jobs in the face of mounting evidence that their duplicitous employer is poisoning them. The depiction of ordinary people trapped by circumstances beyond their control makes for a heart-wrenching modern American tragedy. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, the Gernert Co.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Rebecca Lowman and CJ Wilson lead this immersive and timely debut, set in the late 1970s. Illuminated by the ensemble narration, the audiobook is a family saga involving a logger's dream and looming environmental devastation. Lowman channels the vulnerable strength of Colleen, the town midwife, who is struggling with the miscarriages taking place in the town, including her own. Wilson captures the rugged grit of Rich, who is faced with the enormity of losing everything while yearning to break the family logging legacy for his young son, Chub, who is skillfully brought to life by Mark Sanderlin. Exquisitely narrated in alternating chapters by members of the Gundersen family, this heartbreaking yet hopeful story is a must-listen. M.R. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
    • BookPage
      At the center of Ash Davidson’s exceptional debut novel, Damnation Spring, is Rich Gundersen and his family. At 51, Rich is an aging logger in Northern California’s redwood forest. As the novel opens, he seizes the opportunity to buy a stand of redwoods that includes the mythic 24-7 tree, the numbers signifying its monstrous width of 24 feet, 7 inches. Without telling his wife, Colleen, Rich uses all their savings for the down payment. Colleen is 34, a midwife mourning the death of her newborn, disturbed by the number of infant deaths in their rural community and upset that Rich is unwilling to try for another baby. The couple’s only child, Chub, is about to enter kindergarten. Taught by his father, Chub is already knowledgeable about the creeks and roads in the forest that lead him home. These are the first filaments of the magical web of story that Davidson weaves. The novel follows the family throughout 1977, a year of significant change. The National Park Service is slowly enlarging its holdings in the forest. The Gundersens’ house becomes part of the government takings for Redwood National Park, but the family will retain possession until Rich dies. Anti-logging activists have begun to harass loggers, and the local timber company is faltering, putting local livelihoods at risk. There is so much that is right and particular about this novel. Rarely will a reader have such a tactile experience of life in a forest logging community as one receives here. Davidson also sensitively portrays the fraught relationship between the Indigenous tribe of Yuroks and the white members of the logging community. Here, all politics are local: It slowly dawns on Colleen that herbicides, sprayed to help the logging industry, hurt babies; and the unethical owner of the timber company is a flawed and greedy local guy, not a corporate mover on Wall Street. Davidson was born in Arcata, California, just south of the redwood forest she writes about in Damnation Spring. She's studied the lay of the land, and she expresses the heart and soul of this place and time.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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