Synopses & Reviews
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Named a Best Book of 2021 by Newsweek, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, and the 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.
Review
"Thematically, it's a strong work of climate fiction, but it's rooted in age-old man-versus-nature storytelling. An impressively well-turned story about how environmental damage creeps into our bodies, psyches, and economies."
Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Review
"Probably the best novel I'll read this year. It's about work and love and characters who ring true."
Stephen King
Review
"With great empathy and care, Davidson demonstrates how competing values play out against a backdrop of climate change in America."
The New Yorker
Review
"There is so much that is right and particular about this novel. Rarely will a reader have such a tactile experience of life in a forest logging community as one receives here." BookPage (Starred Review)
Review
"[A] spine-tingling debut."
Oprah Daily
Review
"Pitch perfect...an unforgettable portrait of the very real consequences that environmental decay can hold, for nature and humanity alike."
VOGUE.com
Review
"Damnation Spring is that wonderful evocation of a world so complete you can't believe it's fiction, each character and moment drawn with precision and heart. Davidson crafts a portrait of a marriage inside a portrait of a town inside a portrait of an industry, refracting the consequences of capitalism through people's lives and bodies. A masterful and sensitive explication of how humans are part of their environment no less than trees, mud, other animals, and water, this novel takes place forty years ago but could not be more relevant. If you want to know how we came to find ourselves amid an extinction event, or you need a gripping escape from considering the same, read this book." Merritt Tierce, author of Love Me Back
Review
"A heart-wrenching modern American tragedy."
Publisher's Weekly
Review
"Struggles and heartbreaks play out on the richly rendered backdrop of a community on the brink of major change."
Booklist
Review
"In her astonishingly accomplished first novel, 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
Review
"If you're jonesing for a big family saga, Ash Davidson's debut will do the trick. Damnation Spring tackles major issues with authentic rage and grief."
LA Times
About the Author
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.