It begins on a patch of ground in western Massachusetts. A valley below a mountain, deer track running across a meadow, a brook, a pond, a clearing, the remnants of a recent fire, “beaver stumps and pale-green seedlings rising from the rich black ash”. In the month of June, in an unnamed year – but when the place was still a colony – two lovers escape the Puritan strictures of their community and determine to root themselves there. The reader meets them for only a few pages, but their flight, their passion, the vivid sense of the surroundings makes for a captivating opening to Daniel Mason’s ambitious new novel.
A little salt-box house is built where these lovers land. The novel moves across the months,
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