In the Name of the Trees

A$29.95

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.

OCTOBER 2025 |  ISBN 9781922964281 | Paperback | 152 mm x 229 mm | 160 pages

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.

OCTOBER 2025 |  ISBN 9781922964281 | Paperback | 152 mm x 229 mm | 160 pages

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 Books

 Bobis 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