Clearcut (2005)

In playwright Nina Shengold's first novel, the dense, remote forests of the Pacific Northwest are foggy with more than just precipitation: Her logging-crew protagonists — rugged loner Earley, privileged Berkeley dropout Reed, and troubled femme fatale Zan — spend nearly half the book steaming up the metaphorical windows with their improvised couplings. And though Clearcut sounds like a drugstore bodice-ripper in premise, Shengold easily elevates it with her devotion to the souls — and not just the commingling body parts — of her characters, as well as her pungent language (a freshly cut log kicks up ''a backwash of warm cedar sawdust, as fragrant as cinnamon'').