Book Release Party with Local Flagstaff author Ash Davidson

Date and Time for this Past Event

• Tuesday, Aug 3, 2021  5:30pm - 7pm

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Join us in celebrating the release of Damnation Spring on Tuesday, August 3 from 5:30 - 7 pm.

Ash Davidson is a Flagstaff local and Damnation Spring is her debut novel. An epic, immersive debut, Damnation Spring is the deeply human story of a Pacific Northwest logging town wrenched in two by a mystery that threatens to derail its way of life.

For generations, Rich Gundersen’s family has chopped a livelihood out of the redwood forest along California’s rugged coast. Now Rich and his wife, Colleen, are raising their own young son near Damnation Grove, a swath of ancient redwoods on which Rich’s employer, Sanderson Timber Co., plans to make a killing. In 1977, with most of the forest cleared or protected, a grove like Damnation—and beyond it 24-7 Ridge—is a logger’s dream.

It’s dangerous work. Rich has already lived decades longer than his father, killed on the job. Rich wants better for his son, Chub, so when the opportunity arises to buy 24-7 Ridge—costing them all the savings they’ve squirreled away for their growing family—he grabs it, unbeknownst to Colleen. Because the reality is their family isn’t growing; Colleen has lost several pregnancies. And she isn’t alone. As a midwife, Colleen has seen it with her own eyes.

For decades, the herbicides the logging company uses were considered harmless. But Colleen is no longer so sure. What if these miscarriages aren’t isolated strokes of bad luck? As mudslides take out clear-cut hillsides and salmon vanish from creeks, her search for answers threatens to unravel not just Rich’s plans for the 24-7, but their marriage too, dividing a town that lives and dies on timber along the way.

Told from the perspectives of Rich, Colleen, and Chub, in prose as clear as a spring-fed creek, this intimate, compassionate portrait of a community clinging to a vanishing way of life amid the perils of environmental degradation makes Damnation Spring an essential novel for our time.

PURCHASE NOW FROM BRIGHT SIDE BOOKSHOP TO SAVE 10% ON YOUR PRE-ORDER

This will be an outside event behind Bright Side Bookshop. If you are not fully vaccinated, please wear a mask to protect yourself and others.

"[A] savvy debut.... A strong work of climate fiction...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

"Nowhere else on earth do the trees reach so high as the ancient groves of redwoods that tower over the fog-laced coast of the Pacific Northwest. And in few other settings can a writer erect an overstory so vast, so intricate, so tightly woven that when its readers lean back and gaze into its branches, they are somehow made to feel both diminished and expanded in the very same breath. Like the canopy of an enchanted forest, Damnation Spring is draped in a tapestry of shadows dappled with sunlight, mystery pierced through by beams of revelation, and a harrowing natural beauty capable of drawing forth gorgeous, gracefully wrought prose that is soaring, magnificent, and drenched in birdsong.”
—Kevin Fedarko, author of The Emerald Mile

"Ash Davidson writes with unwavering compassion—for bitterly divided families, for those with fatally opposed ideologies, for our fragile natural world. Such is the rare generosity of spirit that has produced Damnation Spring—an elegant novel of profound power and grace."
—Madhuri Vijay, author of The Far Field