The Tree - Couverture souple

“The Tree is part memoir, part explanation and part warning, one of the most beautiful, succinct and prescient pieces of writing we have.” (Los Angeles Times Book Review)

“[B]elongs alongside the finest wilderness-rambling narratives.” (The New Yorker "Book Bench")

“A revelation.” (The Paris Review "Daily")

“A gentle plea for wilderness [and] an argument for art and the imagination.” (Chicago Tribune, Editor's Choice)

“[A] great book. . . . [T]he perfect little thing to roll up in your pocket and take with you for a lunch in the park. It’s like having a laid-back, wide-ranging conversation with one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century.” (The Stranger)

“[A] beautifully honed plea for us to “be” in the natural world, to seek human creativity through the wild. . . . Beyond the tree and beyond the woods, Fowles challenges us to embrace the unpredictable, the untamable, the unquantifiable.” (Women's Voices for Change)

“THE TREE is the fullest and finest exploration I’ve ever read of how the useless delights to be discovered in nature can ripen into the practice of art.” (Lewis Hyde, author of THE GIFT)

“Please read this book. It says the most important thing, and with a lovely succinctness. Step off the narrow path, so cleverly engineered for you, into the deep cathedral of the woods-where there are no engineers and the true self abides.” (Lydia Millet, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist LOVE IN INFANT MONKEYS)

“THE TREE defies easy definition and even genre. Whatever else it happens to be-memoir, philosophy, natural history-the book is a kind of forest, and Fowles a masterful field guide. He shows us the hidden place where the woods and literature converge.” (Brad Kessler, author of GOAT SONG)

“Delightful... The real subject of this arboreal excursion is not trees at all, but the importance in art of the unpredictable, the unaccountable, the intuitive, the not discernibly useful.” (Atlantic Monthly)

“For years I have carried this book...with me on travels to reread, ponder, envy. In prose of classic gravity, precision, and delicacy, Fowles addresses matters of final importance.”

—Los Angeles Times Book Review

 

“The Tree is the fullest and finest exploration I’ve ever read of how the useless delights to be discovered in nature can ripen into the practice of art.”

—Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift

 

 “The most original argument for wilderness preservation I have encountered.”
—Washington Post

 

Finally back in print, here is the 30th anniversary edition of The Tree—the renowned English novelist John Fowles’s (The Magus, The French Lieutenant’s Woman) moving meditation on the connection between the natural world and human creativity. An inspiring modern ecological classic, The Tree is both a powerful argument against taming the wild and a major author’s  inspiring and beautifully written defense of “the joys of getting lost,” and of spontaneity in life and art.