Michael Christie

The world has been struck by something that is called, or has been called, the Great Withering.

And the cause of it is kind of murky throughout the novel.

It's

It's a series of blights and infestations and diseases that have caused, you know, the majority of the world's trees to die.

And as a result of that, much of the earth has become...

uninhabitable or at least very difficult to inhabit other than these certain zones which of course have become resorts for the wealthy to escape to and this is where the story picks up in that location.

I ended up thinking a lot about wood and about trees because the house is made of the trees we brought, of some trees we brought down to clear the land and had milled right there.

So I was working with wood that had been standing right where I was standing.

And just the, I'm not a very sentimental person, but the significance of that really impacted me.

And the sense that I was shaping these creatures that had been living for decades

nearly a thousand years into a place to put my family and a place to live my life was you know it's it's it's an astonishing uh process to go through firsthand so tyson he's somebody who works with his hands do you get a sort of tactile sense from this book i do it's it's a haptic work you know it's um your engagement with it is um

The world has been struck by something that is called, or has been called, the Great Withering.

And the cause of it is kind of murky throughout the novel.

It's

It's a series of blights and infestations and diseases that have caused, you know, the majority of the world's trees to die.

And as a result of that, much of the earth has become dead.

uninhabitable or at least very difficult to inhabit other than these certain zones which of course have become resorts for the wealthy to escape to and this is where the story picks up in that location.

I ended up thinking a lot about wood and about trees because the house is made of the trees we brought, of some trees we brought down to clear the land and had milled right there.

So I was working with wood that had been standing right where I was standing.

And just the, I'm not a very sentimental person, but the significance of that really impacted me.