The Tree

John Fowles’ provocative meditation on the connection between the natural and human worlds, now in a special new hardback edition, illustrated throughout. “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 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, a genre that has seen recent flourishings in Roger Deakin’s Wildwood, Richard Mabey’s Nature Cure, Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways and Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk. As lyrical and precise as his novels, The Tree is a provocative meditation on the connection between the natural world and human creativity, and also a rejection of the idea that nature should be tamed for human purpose. Now, nearly forty years after its first publication, Little Toller is proud to re-publish this classic book as a special hardback, featuring a new foreword by William Fiennes and specially commissioned wood engravings, in the spirit of The Man Who Planted Trees. This edition is an important addition to Fowles’ published works.