In the tiny timber town of Cordelia, Idaho, ninety-nine year old Weldon Applegate recounts his life in all its glory. It's the story of dark pine forests brewing with ancient magic, and Weldon's struggle as a boy to keep his father's inherited timber claim, the Lost Lot, from the ravenous clutches of Linden Laughlin. Local legend says the Applegate family line boasts some of the greatest lumberjacks to ever roam the American West, but at the beginning...

In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable's girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto, pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them in this tale...

It's 1942, and as the war rages in Europe, Maisie McCall is in the Scottish Highlands swinging an axe for the Women's Timber Corps. Maisie relishes her newfound independence working alongside other lumberjacks--including the mysterious John Lindsay. As Maisie and John work side by side felling trees together, Maisie can't help but feel that their friendship has the spark of something more to it. And yet every time she gets close to him, John pulls...

This novel is about a teenage girl, Ann Holmes, who claims to see the Virgin Mary. A sixteen-year-old runaway, Ann is an itinerant mushroom picker who lives in a tent. But on a November afternoon, in the foggy woods of North Fork, Washington, the Virgin comes to her, clear as day. Father Collins -- a young priest new to North Fork -- finds Ann disturbingly alluring. But it is up to him to evaluate -- impartially -- the veracity of Ann's sightings:...