‘A provocative meditation on the connection between the natural world and human creativity . . .
The writing life of John Fowles was dominated by trees. From the orchards of his childhood in suburban Essex to the woodlands of wartime-Devon, trees filled his imagination and enriched his many best selling and acclaimed novels. Told through his lifelong relationship with trees, blending autobiography, literary criticism, philosophy and nature writing, John Fowles’ The Tree is a masterly, powerful work that laid the literary foundations for nature-as-memoir.’ – Little Toller
‘The first trees I knew well were the apples and pears in the garden of my childhood home. This may sound rural and bucolic, but it was not, for the house was a semi-detached in a 1920s suburb at the mouth of the Thames, some forty miles from London.’ John Fowles