Trees

A compulsive, mesmerising and wildly imaginative novel in the vein of Pan’s Labyrinth and Station Eleven from the award-winning author of The Girl with Glass FeetThere came an elastic aftershock of creaks and groans and then, softly softly, a chinking shower of rubbled cement. Leaves calmed and trunks stood serene. Where, not a minute before, there had been a suburb, there was now only woodland standing amid ruins…There is no warning. No chance to prepare. The trees arrive in the night: thundering up through the ground,transforming streets and towns into shadowy forest. Adrien Thomas has never been much of a hero. But when he realises that no help is coming, he ventures into this unrecognisable world. Alongside green-fingered Hannah and her teenage son Seb, Adrien sets out to find his wife and to discover just how deep the forest goes. Their journey will take them to a place of terrible beauty and violence, to the dark heart of nature and the darkness inside themselves.

The Trees does for trees what Hitchcock did for birds. You have been warned, The strength of the novel is in the visceral descriptions of the forest: the reader feels, smells and hears the trees, convincingly portrayed as sinister, formidable and with unnerving intentions of their own. Shaw gradually builds up a sense of the supernatural, including “whisperers” … A bold, intriguing conceit for a dystopian environmental novel … A valiant exploration into notions of power and leadership, and what humans can do when tested to their limits, Strange and brilliantly unsettling, it’s a vivid look at a world gone to the wild, A strange and vivid journey into an ancient forest that has taken over the world with force. The Trees is a thought-provoking meditation on what it means to be wild. Death, darkness and eerie creatures lurk among the branches, but it’s the human characters that surprise the most ... Ali Shaw once again weaves a fantastical and haunting story, Shaw’s climax is like nothing else, crescendoing with almost CGI levels of spectacle as Tarantino meets Middle Earth

Ali Shaw is the award-winning author of The Girl with Glass Feet and The Man who Rained. He grew up in Dorset and graduated from Lancaster University with a degree in English Literature. He has since worked as a bookseller and at the Bodleian Library. He now lives in Oxford, with his wife and baby daughter.alishaw.co.uk@AliShaw