Barkskins by Annie Proulx

In seventeenth-century New France, two impoverished woodcutters, René Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive to work under brutal conditions as indentured laborers. One stays to build a family that will live among the native Mi’kmaq; the other escapes to forge an empire in the global timber trade. Across three centuries and multiple continents, their descendants bear the consequences of ambition, greed, and survival as forests fall and worlds change. From the Canadian wilderness to China, from shipyards to logging camps, Barkskins is an epic story of humanity’s restless drive to conquer nature—and the price paid across generations.