Overview

‘In the name of the trees, I retrieve you from hurt and sickness.’ In a Philippine ritual of retrieval, Lola Narra tries to heal her granddaughter Dao who was paralysed in an accident that killed her father. They live in Canberra, far from the healing trees of their first home in the village of Iláwod where the story began. But between the Philippines and Australia, the land knows, the trees know: wound on wound on wound—lugad sa lugad sa lugad. Such is the colonial inheritance of four generations of Filipinas named after trees: Banaba, Narra, Pili and Dao. Their rifts are deep, their heartbreaks more wounding. They tell stories to hide, evade, or make truth bearable. But trees remember. They do not lie.

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9781922964281

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Merlinda Bobis is the author of four novels, two works of short fiction and six collections of poetry. Her novel Locust Girl, A Lovesong won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the Philippine National Book Award in 2016. The Kindness of Birds was shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize and the Steel Rudd Award in 2022. She is the recipient of numerous other awards. In 2025 she was named as one of the top 10 female novelists shaping the literary scene in Southeast Asia. She regards her writing as a homecoming: a return to roots, a retrieval through memory and a reckoning with loss hopefully with care and grace. She lives and writes on Ngunnawal Country (Canberra). https://www.merlindabobis.com/

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