At 912 pages, you may need more than a week of campfires to finish Peter Matthiessen’s magnum opus Shadow Country (Modern Library; $40). Set in the Everglades, the novel won the 2008 National Book Award for fiction.

According to presenters of the award, “Shadow Country is an epic of American rise and descent—poetic, mythic, devastating. From his Everglades trilogy Peter Matthiessen has coaxed a masterpiece, a wrenching story of familial, racial and environmental degradation stretching from the Civil War to the Great Depression. His E.J. Watson emerges through a dazzling array of voices as a singular figure in our national literature, the looming personification of manifest destiny within the dark reaches of our history.”

Matthiessen’s epic is a revised and shortened rendering of what was published from 1990 to 1999 as three connected novels: Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River and Bone by Bone. But the author had always envisioned them as one story so he finally published Shadow Country, which features a real-life character named E.J. Watson who was a sugar planter and reputed murderer a century ago. It was a period of wild men and wild nature and Matthiessen, the author of The Snow Leopard, which was awarded The National Book Award for nonfiction in 1979, imagines their story.