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In the Name of the Trees
Read this interview with Merlinda via Canberra City News
Reviews
Merlinda Bobis’ In The Name of the Trees beguiles with its intricate prose and compressed poetics.
— Read the full review by Michelle Hamadache in The Conversation here.Bobis eschews a chronological narration, instead using background fragments to produce a vivid mosaic, where each character holds a piece of truth to the light.
— Read the full review in Australian Book Review here.
I found In The Name of the Trees a passionate and compelling, but also warm and tender read. Through characters who are real in their flaws and their pain, and language that entwines story and place, Bobis illuminates the struggle to find a way through and out of an ugly past while retaining what is good and sustaining about home and culture. Consequently, although it is firmly grounded – dare I say, rooted! – in a particular place, it also speaks more broadly to shared histories of survival and cultural endurance. It deserves the recognition it has received, and more.
— Sue Terry, Whispering Gums. Read the full review here.
Featured in Best New Fiction Books in Artshub for October 2025
Endorsements for previous books:
Merlinda Bobis is a writer whose work transcends … [her] writing, in both her poetry and her prose fiction, is at once reassuring and uncomfortable; it quietly sears as it sings.
—Sydney Review of BooksBobis is a stroyteller whose work draws on the ancient Pacific talkstory tradition yet also blasts it apart with exciting new sounds and justapositions, She is always issuing a challenge to the reader – a haka from the pen.
—New Fiction from the Pacific
Watch Lucy Sussex launch Merlinda’s new book In The Name of The Trees on YouTube.
Merlinda Bobis
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.
Winner 2026 ACT Literary Awards, Fiction
Shortlisted 2026 Prime Minister's Literary Awards, Fiction
OCTOBER 2025 | ISBN 9781922964298 | 160 pages