The Forest

This poignant novel, originally published in French in 1935, is a lyrical evocation of the beauty, the harshness and the tragedy of pioneering life. Based on the author’s own experience of homesteading in northern Alberta at the beginning of the twentieth century, the novel tells the story of a young couple from France, who come to the West filled with naive optimism and romantic hope. Like Adam and Eve they end up being driven from their garden of paradise into a world of death and defeat. Georges Bugnet is a writer for whom nature is a mystical wonder filled with immense grandeur and equally immense destruction. He is conscious of humanity’s need for humility in the face of that power. This translation by David Carpenter captures the richness of Bugnet’s descriptive power of nature and its endearing quality.