Now a mini-series on National Geographic A Washington Post Best Book of the Year & a New York Times Notable Book From the Pulitzer Prize---winning author of The Shipping News and 'Brokeback Mountain' comes the New York Times bestselling epic about the demise of the world's forests. 'Barkskins is grand entertainment in the tradition of Dickens and Tolstoy...the crowning achievement of Annie Proulx's distinguished career, but also perhaps the greatest environmental novel ever written' --San Francisco Chronicle In the late seventeenth century two young Frenchmen, Ren Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord for three years in exchange for land, they become woodcutters--barkskins. Ren suffers extraordinary hardship, oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He is forced to marry a native woman and their descendants live trapped between two cultures. But Duquet runs away, becomes a fur trader, then sets up a timber business. Annie Proulx tells the