Fiona Stafford

A beautiful hardcover anthology of stories by a brilliant and surprising mix of classic and contemporary writers who have been inspired by trees. Trees have starred in stories ever since Ovid described Daphne's metamorphosis into a laurel, and the landscape of literature has long been enlivened by wild woodlands, sacred groves, and fertile orchards. This delightful collection ranges from Ovid to Austen and from Robin Hood's Sherwood Forest (via Thomas Love Peacock's Maid Marian) to Treebeard's story in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Here are forest-haunted fairy tales both classic (the Brothers Grimm) and inventively retold (Angela Carter), and there is room in these woods for comedy as well as terror, in Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, an episode from Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm, and Alexander McCall Smith's Head Tree. Here too are notable writers from around the world, including Yuri Olyesha, Jean Giono, Tove Jansson, Joseph Zobel, Yvonne Vera, Damon Galgut, D. H. Lawrence, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Eudora Welty. From Daphne du Maurier's The Apple Tree to N. K. Narayan's Under the Banyan Tree, the sheer range of tales in these pages will leave readers refreshed and dazzled.

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