Mason, Daniel – The Bell Bookshop

North woods

Emma — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

? A SPELLBINDING MASTERPIECE. READ IT ONCE, REMEMBER IT FOREVER. ?

‘North Woods is a monumental achievement of polyphony and humanity. Relating the narrative of an entire country via a single plot of land, it sweeps the reader through hundreds of years and an array of protagonists with a deft, heartbreaking, idiosyncratic zeal’ Maggie O’Farrell

OVER FOUR CENTURIES,

‘This is a time-spanning, genre-blurring work of storytelling magic . . . The only constants are the land and Mason’s genius’ Washington Post

A SINGLE HOUSE DEEP IN THE WOODS OF NEW ENGLAND

‘Dazzling . . . weaves a Cloud Atlas-style narrative of humanity under pressure and nature under threat . . . Brave and original . . . intimate and epic, playful and serious’ Guardian

IS HOME TO RUNAWAYS AND VISIONARIES, INSEPARABLE TWINS, A LOVELORN PAINTER, A DESPERATE MOTHER AND A RUTHLESS CON-MAN.

‘It seems almost a magic trick, the way in which Mason knits his lives into a single tale’ Sunday Times

IT WILL CHANGE THE WAY YOU SEE THE WORLD.

‘North Woods has been heaped with praise and hype, and deservedly so. This is a book that treats life as a miracle and demands the proper awe from its readers’ The Times

North woods

Emma — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and inhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths a mass grave - only to discover that the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a sinister conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle: as each inhabitant confronts the wonder and mystery around them, they begin to realise that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.

Winter Soldier

Emma — Thu, 03 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Shortlisted for the 2020 Joyce Carol Oates Prize

‘Part mystery, part war story, part romance, The Winter Soldier is a dream of a novel’ – Anthony Doerr, author of All The Light We Cannot See.

From the bestselling author of The Piano Tuner, comes Daniel Mason’s The Winter Soldier, a story of love and medicine through the devastation of the First World War.

Vienna, 1914. Lucius is a twenty-two-year-old medical student when World War I explodes across Europe. Enraptured by romantic tales of battlefield surgery, he enlists, only to find himself posted to a remote field-hospital ravaged by typhus. Supplies have all but run out, the other doctors have fled, and only a single nurse remains, from whom he must learn a brutal, makeshift medicine.

Then one day, an unconscious soldier is brought in from the snow, his uniform stuffed with strange drawings. He seems beyond rescue, until Lucius makes a fateful decision that will change the course of his life.

From the gilded ballrooms of Imperial Vienna to the frozen forests of the Eastern Front, The Winter Soldier is the story of finding love in the sweeping tides of history, and of the mistakes we make and the precious opportunities to atone.

Far Country

Emma — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

When they spoke of it in town, they called it simply the city, as if it was the only city in the world . . .

Raised in a remote village on the edge of a sugarcane plantation, Isabel was born with the gift and curse of ‘seeing farther’. When drought and war grip their land, her beloved brother Isaias joins a great exodus to a teeming, labyrinthine city in the south.

Soon the fourteen-year-old Isabel follows, forsaking the only home she’s ever known, her sole consolation the thought of being with her brother again. But when she arrives, she discovers that Isaias has disappeared. Weeks and then months pass, until one day, armed only with her unshakeable hope, Isabel descends into the chaos of the city to find him.

Told with extraordinary empathy, richly evocative, the story of Isabel’s quest – of her dignity and determination, her deeply spiritual world – becomes a universal tale about the bonds of family and a sister’s love for her brother, about being caught between two worlds, and about true heroism. A tour de force of emotional and narrative power, it is destined to become a classic.

‘Mason is a superb storyteller. He inhabits Isabel’s mind with fine sensitivity, and cleverly uses his imaginary setting to write of dauntless, timeless love and loyalty’ The Times