Daniel Mason is one of the most versatile authors in my reading orbit. The Piano Tuner (2002) and Winter Soldier (2018) are serious, realistic stories of a specific time and place (Burma and Vienna) with somewhat unusual/absurd circumstances (moving a piano halfway across the world during the 1880s Burmese wars and running a field hospital in WWI from a bombed out church in the Carpathian Mountains).  

North Woods, (2023) is a multi-genre, multi-narrative, multi-time period book that combines realism and magical realism with time travel, ghosts, and historical touchstones, all of it centering around a single house in Massachusetts. It’s a little wacky and confusing but inventive and compelling. 

His latest, Country People (2026), is wackier and sillier, but entertaining, funny, and often (though not always) realistic. Like all of his books, the characters drive the story–they are unique, memorable, believable, often weird, and usually likable. This is his superpower as a writer. Perhaps because he’s also a physician (a psychiatrist affiliated with Stanford where he also teaches writing), he can draw on a wealth of experience.

In a nutshell, this book follows Miles, a forty-something academic who has started but not finished 11 different PhD dissertation topics, his wife, Kate, a superstar professor and expert in Milton, and their young children, Wesley and Olive, as they leave California for a liberal arts college in Vermont. Kate is the breadwinner and much loved by all her students; Miles wanders in the woods, joins a strange group of cave seekers, listens to a local call-in radio show, and takes care of the kids. 

The interactions are hilarious, from the rural lifestyle and activities to the very real challenges of parenting and career. Meeting this cast of characters is worth the price of the book. I suppose sometimes it gets a little too strange or off track or down a rabbit hole, but overall it’s an amusing, well crafted story. 4.5 ⭐️