Barkskins

Overview

Barkskins is a historical and ecological novel by American writer Annie Proulx, first published in 2016. A sweeping family saga as well as a chronicle of forestry, it follows more than three centuries of settlement, commerce, and environmental change in and beyond North America. Its many human stories are bound together by a larger presence: the forests that people clear, exploit, and gradually destroy. Proulx makes the forest more than a setting for historical events; its transformation is the central consequence against which generations of ambition and hardship are measured.

The novel opens in the late seventeenth century, when two impoverished Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France hoping to make a future for themselves. They are bound to a seigneur for three years in exchange for land and become woodcutters, known as barkskins. Sel is sent to clear the forest and endures the severe conditions of that labor. He is forced to marry a Mi’kmaw woman, and their descendants live between cultures and social worlds. Duquet escapes the seigneur, turns first to fur trading, and eventually establishes a timber business. Their paths diverge, but the stories of their descendants continue across the centuries. Family members travel throughout North America and to Europe, China, and New Zealand, encountering rivalry, illness, accidents, colonial violence, and cultural destruction. As fortunes rise and fall, the forests themselves recede, making the long family chronicle inseparable from the history of ecological loss.

Themes and background

The novel examines the human habit of treating nature as a store of wealth, even when the consequences of extraction are plain. Timber provides livelihoods and fortunes, but the pursuit of those gains also erases habitats and damages Indigenous communities and ways of life. Proulx links colonial settlement and commercial expansion to repeated patterns of short-term thinking: one generation clears the land, while later generations inherit both its profits and its costs. The novel’s environmental perspective reaches into the present, inviting reflection on deforestation and climate change without reducing its characters to illustrations of an argument.

Proulx had conceived the project decades before publication. Her interest in woods began in childhood, when she spent considerable time among them, and was encouraged by her mother. She also became attentive to the contrast between the richness of the natural world and the extractive attitudes of those seeking wealth from it. Her sustained interest in place, landscape, work, and the forces shaping local lives informed the book’s unusually broad historical scope. Proulx described the lost forests as the story’s chief character: the people carry the narrative of how the wooded world was cut down. That conception helps explain why the novel follows a large cast across generations while keeping the changing land at its center.

Reception and standing

Barkskins attracted wide notice on publication. It was named a New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and it was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction. Reviews emphasized its treatment of deforestation, settler colonialism, and contemporary ecological danger. The novel extends Proulx’s characteristic attention to regional life into a global account of timber and trade, pairing intimate family histories with centuries of environmental change. Rather than presenting settlement as a straightforward story of progress, it shows how wealth and loss accumulate together. Barkskins is widely regarded as one of Proulx’s major later works and as a distinctive contemporary environmental epic, notable for making the destruction of forests the enduring measure of human ambition.