NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK: Entertainment Weekly, Oprah Daily, Vogue, Los Angeles Times, The Daily Beast, CNN, Harper’s Bazaar
“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.
Genre: General Fiction
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK: Entertainment Weekly, Oprah Daily, Vogue, Los Angeles Times, The Daily Beast, CNN, Harper’s Bazaar
“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.
Genre: General Fiction
Praise for this book
"So absorbing is Damnation Spring, so rich with the atmosphere of a time and a place, that when I laid the book down it was hard not to look around my living room and wonder where the redwoods had gone. What impresses me the most about Ash Davidson and her writing is how deeply she understands her characters, and how sharply she has observed their world, yet how little fuss she makes about it. There's not an ounce of ego on display here, which means that it's never the singer you hear, always the song. And the song, in this case, is magnificent." - Kevin Brockmeier
"Damnation Spring is, like the redwood trees at the center of its story, a beautiful, timeless, and breathtaking novel. It is painstakingly researched and lovingly crafted. But most importantly, the author is incredibly sensitive and tender with her characters, who, for the reader, quickly become as close as neighbors or family. Ultimately, time is the best judge of artistic quality, but for me, this book has all the makings of a classic. It is, in my estimation, a Great American Novel. A novel that tips its cap at writers like Steinbeck and Kesey, but also confidently forges ahead, blazing new paths. Just - a stunning, wondrous book." - Nickolas Butler
"In her astonishingly accomplished first novel, Ash Davidson reminds us that we are never more profoundly shaped by our environment than when we destroy it. Nearly every page left me in awe." - Anthony Marra
"Unavoidable, maybe, but Damnation Spring recalls Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion, a big, rollicking crowd pleaser of a family saga set in hardscrabble logging country. Ash Davidson's homespun characters aren't just local color. Like their community, they face a reckoning as their lives and livelihoods collide with the wider world." - Stewart O'Nan
"The kind of novel I've been craving for ages - every page stirred my soul." - Emily Ruskovich
"Damnation Spring is that wonderful evocation of a world so complete you can't believe it's fiction, each character and moment drawn with precision and heart. Davidson crafts a portrait of a marriage inside a portrait of a town inside a portrait of an industry, refracting the consequences of capitalism through people's lives and bodies. A masterful and sensitive explication of how humans are part of their environment no less than trees, mud, other animals, and water, this novel takes place forty years ago but could not be more relevant. If you want to know how we came to find ourselves amid an extinction event, or you need a gripping escape from considering the same, read this book." - Merritt Tierce
"Ash Davidson writes with unwavering compassion--for bitterly divided families, for those with fatally opposed ideologies, for our fragile natural world. Such is the rare generosity of spirit that has produced Damnation Spring--an elegant novel of profound power and grace." - Madhuri Vijay
"Damnation Spring is, like the redwood trees at the center of its story, a beautiful, timeless, and breathtaking novel. It is painstakingly researched and lovingly crafted. But most importantly, the author is incredibly sensitive and tender with her characters, who, for the reader, quickly become as close as neighbors or family. Ultimately, time is the best judge of artistic quality, but for me, this book has all the makings of a classic. It is, in my estimation, a Great American Novel. A novel that tips its cap at writers like Steinbeck and Kesey, but also confidently forges ahead, blazing new paths. Just - a stunning, wondrous book." - Nickolas Butler
"In her astonishingly accomplished first novel, Ash Davidson reminds us that we are never more profoundly shaped by our environment than when we destroy it. Nearly every page left me in awe." - Anthony Marra
"Unavoidable, maybe, but Damnation Spring recalls Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion, a big, rollicking crowd pleaser of a family saga set in hardscrabble logging country. Ash Davidson's homespun characters aren't just local color. Like their community, they face a reckoning as their lives and livelihoods collide with the wider world." - Stewart O'Nan
"The kind of novel I've been craving for ages - every page stirred my soul." - Emily Ruskovich
"Damnation Spring is that wonderful evocation of a world so complete you can't believe it's fiction, each character and moment drawn with precision and heart. Davidson crafts a portrait of a marriage inside a portrait of a town inside a portrait of an industry, refracting the consequences of capitalism through people's lives and bodies. A masterful and sensitive explication of how humans are part of their environment no less than trees, mud, other animals, and water, this novel takes place forty years ago but could not be more relevant. If you want to know how we came to find ourselves amid an extinction event, or you need a gripping escape from considering the same, read this book." - Merritt Tierce
"Ash Davidson writes with unwavering compassion--for bitterly divided families, for those with fatally opposed ideologies, for our fragile natural world. Such is the rare generosity of spirit that has produced Damnation Spring--an elegant novel of profound power and grace." - Madhuri Vijay
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