'Ash Davidson reminds us that we are never more profoundly shaped by our environment than when we destroy it. Nearly every page left me in awe' Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena For generations, Rich Gunderson's family has chopped a living out of the redwood forest on California's rugged coast. It's treacherous work, and though his son Chub hopes for nothing more than to scale the huge trees like his father, Rich longs to give him a safer future. Now timber giant Sanderson Co. looks set make a killing on Damnation Grove, a swath of uncut redwoods on Rich's doorstep, that could be the answer to his prayers. But it's a gamble that's going to take everything he's got, and not one he's prepared to share with his wife, Colleen. Colleen, meanwhile, is guarding secrets of her own: the pain of her dwindling hopes that one day there will be a little brother or sister for Chub, the evidence she is gathering that she's not the only woman to have lost several pregnancies, the arrival in town of an old flame who may just be able to confirm her worst fear: that there's something poisonously wrong at the heart of the forest, which threatens to tear their whole community apart.