Ash Davidson Libri

*'Probably the best novel I'll read this year. It's about work and love and characters who ring true. By the time I was 50 pages in I couldn't put it down. Can't stop thinking about it' Stephen King* For generations, Rich Gundersen's family has made a living felling giant redwoods on California's rugged coast. It's treacherous work, and though his son, Chub, wants nothing more than to step into his father's boots, Rich longs for a bigger future for him. Colleen just wants a brother or sister for Chub, but she's losing hope. There is so much that she and Rich don't talk about these days - including her suspicions that there is something very wrong at the heart of the forest on which their community is built. When Rich is offered the opportunity to buy a plot of timber which borders Damnation Grove, he leaps at the chance - without telling Colleen. Soon the Gundersens find themselves on opposite sides of a battle that threatens to rip their town apart. Can they find a way to emerge from this together?

Colleen and Rich Gundersen are raising their young son, Chub, on the rugged California coast. It's 1977, and life in their Pacific Northwest logging town isn't what it used to be. Colleen is an amateur midwife. Rich is a tree-topper, a dangerous job that requires him to scale trees hundreds of feet tall-and a job that both his father and grandfather died doing. Colleen and Rich both want a better life for their son, but as each takes steps to assure his future, they find themselves on opposite sides of a budding conflict that threatens the very thing they are trying to protect: their family. Told in prose as clear as a spring-fed creek, Damnation Spring is an extraordinary story of the transcendent, enduring power of love-between husband and wife, mother and child, and within a tight-knit community on the brink. An essential novel for our times.