Barkskins

Barkskins follows two families descended from seventeenth-century French woodcutters across three hundred years of North American history, tracing the expansion and eventual exhaustion of the continent's forests through the generations that profited from their destruction. Annie Proulx's scale is genuinely epic, moving across continents and centuries while maintaining the individual human texture of each generation's particular choices and their consequences.

Robert Petkoff's narration manages the novel's extraordinary scope with a storyteller's authority, keeping the three-century sweep grounded in specific people and moments. The environmental argument embedded in the family history is never didactic because Proulx trusts the accumulation of detail to make the case, and Petkoff honors that trust by letting the story speak without editorializing.