Tracy Chevalier

The Lie Tree

by Frances Hardinge

“I don’t know how Frances Hardinge came up with this crazy idea that a tree would feed on lies. Nothing really prepares you for the book going so off-piste and that’s what I love about it—it’s really wild! I thought it was an incredibly creative way of using a tree.” — via Interview, March 2016

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

by Betty Smith

“It’s also an immigrant; it’s also scrabbling to survive. People are always trying to get rid of it: they chop it down and they pull it up, yet from the chopped-down tree springs a new tree. They never can seem to get rid of it and it grows in the courtyard of the tenements where the family lives. At the end, the family falls apart and yet still survives, just as the tree continues to grow.” — via Interview, March 2016

The Trees

The Awakening Land, Book One

by Conrad Richter

“The trees are so strong and permanent that in order to survive there, you have to uproot the trees and they’re constantly pushing their way back in. It was in this book that I began to understand how hard it is to uproot a tree. If you’re going to plant a field full of something, you have to clear the land first, and the trees do not want to give up their roots very easily. It’s hellish getting them up.” — via Interview, March 2016

Howards End

by E. M. Forster

“The tree, and the tales surrounding it, represents a more organic and rural way of looking at the world, while Henry is more urban and modern. The two clash and, in the end, when it all falls apart and Margaret has to prop Henry up because his son is going to prison for having knocked over and killed Leonard Bast, there’s a resurgence of an older way of thinking.” — via Interview, March 2016

Jane Eyre

by Charlotte Brontë

“Rochester proposes to Jane there, and then the next night it’s split in half by lightning. It’s a heavy-handed symbol but it’s still incredibly satisfying. It’s not even that the tree is struck down and killed, it’s split in half. The idea of marriage is that two people are going to become one, but here you know—because of the mad woman in the attic—that it’s one thing about to be split in two.” — via Interview, March 2016