A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'One of the greatest American writers' Independent From Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize-�winning author of The Shipping News and "Brokeback Mountain," comes her masterwork: an epic, dazzling, violent, magnificently dramatic novel about the taking down of the world's forests. In the late seventeenth century two penniless young Frenchmen, Ren� Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord, a "seigneur," for three years in exchange for land, they become wood-cutters - barkskins. Ren� suffers extraordinary hardship, oppressed by the forest ... continue