Damnation Spring, Ash Davidson
Damnation Spring, Ash Davidson
2 Rating(s)
List: $29.99 | Sale: $21.00
Club: $14.99

Damnation Spring

Author: Ash Davidson

Narrator: CJ Wilson, Rebecca Lowman, Mark Sanderlin, Candace Thaxton

Unabridged: 15 hr 39 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/03/2021


Synopsis

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Named a Best Book of the Year by Newsweek, San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, and 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.

About Ash Davidson

Ash Davidson was born in Arcata, California, and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has been supported by the Arizona Commission on the Arts and MacDowell. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Yun

At first glance, Damnation Spring seems to be exactly the sort of book I would enjoy. The premise is amazing and so is the setting. But the story takes so long to get going and is so bogged down by technical logging jargon that I lost patience with it. Rich is a fourth generation logger making a livi......more

Goodreads review by Will

He pictured the 24-7 tree herself: a monster, grown even wider now than the twenty-four feet, seven inches that originally earned her the name, three hundred seventy feet high, the tallest of the scruff of old-growth redwoods left along the top of 24-7 Ridge. He’d circled that tree every morning......more

Goodreads review by Sara

I am a very well-read librarian and I'm going to say that Damnation Spring may be the best book I have ever read. I couldn't put it down and then I had to stop and take a break before I finished it because I did not want it to end. I felt fully immersed in the issues, the characters, the setting, an......more