This remarkable new novel from Mason (The Winter Soldier) is the story of the United States from precolonial times through the present day and beyond, from the perspective of a single house in Western Massachusetts. As the often-tragic tales of its various residents are recounted, Mason employs an array of literary styles and genres, including the Indigenous-abduction narrative, folk ballads, letters, true-crime pulp journalism, insect erotica, and contemporary speculative fiction. Beginning with young lovers running away from their Puritan community, the novel visits (among others) an obsessive apple cultivator and his eccentric twin daughters, a landscape painter whose friendship with a writer blossoms into forbidden love, a phony clairvoyant who for the first time detects real spirits, and a man with schizophrenia who is aware of the ghosts inhabiting the property. Throughout, and especially during times when the house lies vacant, the natural history of the land over time is compellingly portrayed. VERDICT Although the novel spends varying amounts of time with each successive set of characters, Mason depicts all of their stories with sympathy, sensitivity, and affectionate humor. Epic in scope and ambitious in style, this book succeeds on all counts. Highly recommended.--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman

Mason (A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth) follows the inhabitants of a secluded western Massachusetts home and their tragedies across centuries in this spectacular ghost story. In the 1760s, the eccentric and twice-widowed Charles Osgood, who's obsessed with finding the best apple in the world, discovers a stellar tree on abandoned land and from there starts an orchard. His two daughters, Mary and Alice, keep the orchard going but Alice's long line of potential suitors sparks murderous rage in Mary, who doesn't get the same attention as her sister. The letters of the next owner, hyper-naturalistic landscape painter William Henry Teale, recount his expansion of the house and his slowly confessed, eventually consummated but doomed love for his friend Erasmus Nash. Circa 1920, the ghosts of Teale and Nash torment Emily Farnsworth, until her button magnate husband invites charlatan medium Anastasia Rossi to the house, and her seance unexpectedly conjures real spirits. The Farnsworths' daughter, Lillian, struggles later with her schizophrenic son, Robert. In her later years, she joins a prison pen pal program and narrowly escapes a grisly fate. As time passes, others are drawn to the house for personal reasons that all end in tragedy. Throughout, Mason interleaves his crystalline prose with enchanting and authentic-seeming historical documents, including a Native American captivity narrative, psychiatrist case notes, and pulpy true crime reportage. Each arc is beautifully, heartbreakingly conveyed, stitching together subtle connections across time. This astonishes. Agent: Christy Fletcher, Fletcher and Co. (Sept.)

A young couple escapes their colonial Massachusetts colony and runs for seven days before being free from pursuit. Finding fertile land, they establish a homestead, plant a garden, and start a family. That origin story and its biblical themes presage the ambitious task Mason (A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth, 2020) sets for himself as this land and home serve as a through line for centuries of occupants in this magisterial mosaic. Apples are a core symbol for Mason. When a violent attacker is felled by an axe, an apple seed takes root, "a shoot rises, thickens, seeks the bars of light above it, gently parts the fifth and sixth ribs that once guarded the dead man's meager heart." Subsequent tenants of the land include Charles Osgood, whose dream is to cultivate the perfect apple. Osgood's Wonder becomes a sought-after variety. Long after Osgood has gone to soil, his twin daughters maintain the orchard well into spinsterhood. Years later, a little-known painter finds solitude on the homestead, but his heart is asunder, hiding an illicit love until his nurse provides him with the courage to finally express his yearnings. Other inhabitants reinforce the dual nature of the human condition, simultaneously serving as minuscule collections of molecules against the inevitable march of time while also contributing to a collective, quasi-supernatural consciousness. Truly triumphant.