Damnation Spring

Damnation Spring

Unabridged — 15 hours, 39 minutes

Damnation Spring

Damnation Spring

Unabridged — 15 hours, 39 minutes

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Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Life in 1970s Klamath is hard: This is a company town, and everyone is impacted by the decisions the Sanderson Lumber company makes — including spraying herbicides to make logging easier. Damnation Spring is a heartbreaking story set in a fragile world. Ash Davidson has incredible compassion for her characters and the decisions they make, good and bad, on behalf of their families, and you’ll hear the echoes of John Steinbeck in this astonishingly assured debut as you fall in love with Rich and Colleen Gunderson and their son Chub. A terrific recommendation for readers of The Overstory by Richard Powers, Deep River by Karl Marlantes, and Barkskins by Annie Proulx.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Named a Best Book of 2021 by Newsweek, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times

“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.

Editorial Reviews

SEPTEMBER 2021 - AudioFile

Rebecca Lowman and CJ Wilson lead this immersive and timely debut, set in the late 1970s. Illuminated by the ensemble narration, the audiobook is a family saga involving a logger’s dream and looming environmental devastation. Lowman channels the vulnerable strength of Colleen, the town midwife, who is struggling with the miscarriages taking place in the town, including her own. Wilson captures the rugged grit of Rich, who is faced with the enormity of losing everything while yearning to break the family logging legacy for his young son, Chub, who is skillfully brought to life by Mark Sanderlin. Exquisitely narrated in alternating chapters by members of the Gundersen family, this heartbreaking yet hopeful story is a must-listen. M.R.R. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

06/28/2021

Davidson’s impressive debut chronicles life in a working-class community so thoroughly that the reader feels the characters’ anguish as they’re divided over environmental concerns that threaten their lives and livelihoods. The tale unfolds between 1977 and 1978 and follows the Gundersen family: husband and wife Rich and Colleen; and their kindergartner son, Chub. Rich is a fourth-generation logger who dreams of a less financially burdensome future for his family when, without telling Colleen, he plunks down their savings to buy a ridge near their home in Northern California with a harvestable forest of primordial redwoods. Meanwhile Colleen—who has suffered eight miscarriages before and after Chub’s birth and who, as the local midwife, has witnessed a disturbing number of defective births—is listening to an environmentalist friend’s warning that the defoliants used by the timber company that employs Rich are leaching lethal toxins into the local water supply. Davidson mirrors the tension between Rich and Colleen with empathetic descriptions of the struggles of their neighbors, many of whom cling desperately to their jobs in the face of mounting evidence that their duplicitous employer is poisoning them. The depiction of ordinary people trapped by circumstances beyond their control makes for a heart-wrenching modern American tragedy. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, the Gernert Co. (Aug.)

From the Publisher

Probably the best novel I’ll read this year. It’s about work and love and characters who ring true.”
Stephen King

"A glorious book—an assured novel that’s gorgeously told... Redwoods have been plundered by humans, damaged in fires and taken down in floods, but they’re also incredibly resilient. And as characters in Davidson’s graceful rendering remind us, humans are equally resilient. After great loss, they, too, can keep growing."
—The New York Times Book Review

"With great empathy and care, Davidson demonstrates how competing values play out against a backdrop of climate change in America."
—The New Yorker

“[An] ambitious debut [that] gains momentum as Davidson pulls together its foundational concepts— family, work, honor, and loyalty. Damnation Spring is full of surprises.”
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"[This] story runs as clear as the mountain streams that draw salmon back to spawn... Damnation Spring joins Richard Powers’s Overstory and Annie Proulx’s Barkskins in a growing collection of epic novels about our interactions with trees."
—The Washington Post

“An incredibly moving epic about an unforgettable family.”
CBS Sunday Morning


“[With] the page-turning urgency of a thriller...the novel tells many characters’ stories—affirming, in the end, the strength of community. Davidson’s prose is absolutely beautiful, every detail immersing us in this landscape fully and seamlessly as she reveals characters’ tensions, longings, disappointments, and their attachment to the land. Damnation Spring is a must-read for environmentalists above all.”
—EcoLit Books

“In her exceptional debut novel, Ash Davidson expresses the heart and soul of Northern California's redwood forest community.”
—BookPage

"[A] powerful debut novel... [A] showdown as inevitable as a mudslide [propels] the community down a path as steep and treacherous as any logging road. It’s a path Davidson portrays in exquisite detail... In Damnation Spring, giant trees are brought low by human machinations. Communities can be, too."
The Boston Globe

“Pitch perfect...an unforgettable portrait of the very real consequences that environmental decay can hold, for nature and humanity alike."
—VOGUE.com

“This debut novel drops readers into redwood country, where loggers tangle with ‘tree-huggers’ and families eke out a living. Like her majestic setting, Davidson provides danger and warmth."
—New York Times Book Review, gift-giving feature

"[An] astonishingly polished and immensely affecting debut novel... What makes Damnation Spring such a knockout — and so devastating to stomach — is Davidson’s mature grasp of the precarity of life and the complexities of the human condition. It’s the Gundersons’ fierce love for each other and unwavering resilience despite multiple betrayals and near unshakeable losses that transform the book from a treatise on the dangers of an unfettered industrial complex and the impacts of climate change into a prescient and deeply felt novel about (mostly) good people just doing their best to survive."
—San Francisco Chronicle

" [A] spine-tingling debut."
—Oprah Daily

"A beautifully immersive debut...a compassionate portrayal of a family and community clinging to a quickly vanishing way of life."
—Arizona Daily Sun

"If you’re jonesing for a big family saga, Ash Davidson’s debut will do the trick. Damnation Spring tackles major issues with authentic rage and grief."
—LA Times

“[An] ambitious, assured debut...a devastating page-turner with a love story at its center.”
LitHub

“This one might be the best novel of the year. It’s this incredible story that is being compared to John Steinbeck...I usually just brush off those comparisons, but I think it’s actually worthy."
—WBEZ Nerdette Podcast

"There is so much that is right and particular about this novel. Rarely will a reader have such a tactile experience of life in a forest logging community as one receives here. Davidson also sensitively portrays the fraught relationship between the Indigenous tribe of Yuroks and the white members of the logging community. Here, all politics are local: It slowly dawns on Colleen that herbicides, sprayed to help the logging industry, hurt babies; and the unethical owner of the timber company is a flawed and greedy local guy, not a corporate mover on Wall Street. Davidson was born in Arcata, California, just south of the redwood forest she writes about in Damnation Spring. She’s studied the lay of the land, and she expresses the heart and soul of this place and time."BookPage (starred review)

"As thoughtfully as Davidson establishes these dilemmas, she’s equally skilled at writing an outdoorsy adventure novel, in which logging threatens the lives of workers with snapped cables and everybody else via landslides. Thematically, it’s a strong work of climate fiction, but it's rooted in age-old man-versus-nature storytelling. An impressively well-turned story about how environmental damage creeps into our bodies, psyches, and economies."
Kirkus (starred review)

"Davidson’s impressive debut chronicles life in a working-class community so thoroughly that the reader feels the characters’ anguish as they’re divided over environmental concerns that threaten their lives and livelihoods....The depiction of ordinary people trapped by circumstances beyond their control makes for a heart-wrenching modern American tragedy."
Publisher's Weekly

“Well-researched...this lengthy novel spans just one year over four decades ago—the summer of 1977 to the summer of 1978—but it couldn’t be more relevant today."
The Daily Beast

"Struggles and heartbreaks play out on the richly rendered backdrop of a community on the brink of major change."
Booklist

“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, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

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, author of Love Me Back

"Nowhere else on earth do the trees reach so high as the ancient groves of redwoods that tower over the fog-laced coast of the Pacific Northwest. And in few other settings can a writer erect an overstory so vast, so intricate, so tightly woven that when its readers lean back and gaze into its branches, they are somehow made to feel both diminished and expanded in the very same breath. Like the canopy of an enchanted forest, Damnation Spring is draped in a tapestry of shadows dappled with sunlight, mystery pierced through by beams of revelation, and a harrowing natural beauty capable of drawing forth gorgeous, gracefully wrought prose that is soaring, magnificent, and drenched in birdsong.” —Kevin Fedarko, author of The Emerald Mile

“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, author of A World Away and Songs for the Missing

“With its lavishly evoked, fog-bound rainforest, its sawtooth humor, shifting narrative perspectives, and testosterone-fueled battles against nature, Damnation Spring inevitably recalls Ken Kesey's Sometimes A Great Notion. But Ash Davidson treads boldly beyond Kesey's narrow vision to the profit motives that exploit a brutal machismo culture, bereft of health or humanity. Most poignantly, she gives voice to the women whose lives and unborn children succumb to chemical and timber company bottom lines. Her scenes of childbirth, grief, and helpless rage mirror in heartbreaking detail the reality of families in the poisoned, strip-mined clearcuts of the Pacific Northwest today.” —Carol Van Strum, author of A Bitter Fog: Herbicides and Human Rights, and The Oreo File

"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, author of The Far Field

"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, author of The Ghost Variations and The Brief History of the Dead

“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, author of Shotgun Lovesongs and Little Faith

"Damnation Spring dignifies the working-class experience with complicated characters whose hopes and heartbreaks at once transcend and are defined by their relationship to labor. Davidson evokes a story so vivid that readers will smell the trees, feel the damp, and—most importantly—care about a family." —Sarah Smarsh, author of Heartland

"A sweeping family saga of love and grief and the deeply personal tragedies that occur when our planet is abused. This is the kind of novel I’ve been craving for ages. Ambitious in its scope, masterful in its execution. This stunning story, written in pitch-perfect prose, announces Ash Davidson as a major new voice in American Literature. Every page stirred my soul." Emily Ruskovich, author of Idaho

Library Journal

★ 07/01/2021

DEBUT Opening in summer 1977, Davidson's powerful debut novel about California logging families slowly uncovers the dirty secrets of the Sanderson Timber Company. Everyone's livelihood depends on Sanderson, so no one is talking about how they harvest Damnation Grove: spraying with herbicides similar to Agent Orange, working loggers to exhaustion and injury, and using force to eliminate anyone who speaks out against their practices. Fourth-generation logger Rich Gundersen is worn down from his injuries, while his wife, Colleen, a midwife, regularly witnesses miscarriages and the birth of malformed babies. Daniel Bywater, a Yurok fish biologist whose tribe has fished the area's creeks for centuries, arrives to study the suspect water quality and declining fish population. His presence, along with the protesters blocking roads and sabotaging machinery, stirs up unspeakable violence. Rich sees a way out, by purchasing an old-growth redwood stand whose million-dollar timber harvest should set up his family for life, but he doesn't count on family betrayal and the ruthlessness of timber company executives, the worst traitors of all. VERDICT Davidson's riveting page-turner reveals one harsh reality after another, with no happy ending. The stakes are high, loyalty vanishes, and family ties mean nothing. A strong writer to watch.—Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO

SEPTEMBER 2021 - AudioFile

Rebecca Lowman and CJ Wilson lead this immersive and timely debut, set in the late 1970s. Illuminated by the ensemble narration, the audiobook is a family saga involving a logger’s dream and looming environmental devastation. Lowman channels the vulnerable strength of Colleen, the town midwife, who is struggling with the miscarriages taking place in the town, including her own. Wilson captures the rugged grit of Rich, who is faced with the enormity of losing everything while yearning to break the family logging legacy for his young son, Chub, who is skillfully brought to life by Mark Sanderlin. Exquisitely narrated in alternating chapters by members of the Gundersen family, this heartbreaking yet hopeful story is a must-listen. M.R.R. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2021-05-19
Big business, protesters, and working-class loggers clash in this environmentally savvy debut.

Davidson’s novel takes place in Northern California forest territory between 1977 and 1978, as Rich Gundersen, a fourth-generation logger, is poised to make a big profit: He’s just purchased a stretch of land full of old-growth redwoods whose sale could provide security for his family, which is smaller than he’d like; he and his wife, Colleen, have one son, Graham (nicknamed Chub), but as the story opens she’s just had another in a string of miscarriages. Other crises soon emerge. Anti-logging protesters are trying to halt work and are suspected of having left a child’s skull in the forest to prompt an investigation. Colleen, a midwife, witnesses an increase in stillbirths, many with serious deformations. Daniel, a researcher and Colleen’s ex-boyfriend, suspects chemicals sprayed by the timber company are responsible, but any delay to investigate threatens Rich’s plans to cut down and sell the redwoods. Davidson researched this milieu deeply but with an eye toward making every discovery feel natural and unforced. By shifting perspectives among Rich, Colleen, and Chub, she reveals not just the conflicts among loggers, protesters, and companies, but the growing stress within the family. The family of Colleen’s sister, Enid, whose husband is working an illicit tree-poaching scam, adds another layer of tension. (And Colleen can’t help but resent that Enid’s brood is ever growing: “Enid uncrosses her legs for two minutes and a baby pops out.”) As thoughtfully as Davidson establishes these dilemmas, she’s equally skilled at writing an outdoorsy adventure novel in which logging threatens the lives of workers with snapped cables and everybody else via landslides. Thematically, it’s a strong work of climate fiction, but it's rooted in age-old man-versus-nature storytelling.

An impressively well-turned story about how environmental damage creeps into our bodies, psyches, and economies.

Product Details

BN ID: 2940173323552
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication date: 08/03/2021
Edition description: Unabridged
Sales rank: 200,456

Customer Reviews