The Lie Tree

"It is, it’s really surprising. The novel starts out as standard historical fiction. It’s set in the 19th century and is about a family. The father is a naturalist. He’s been run out of town because it’s revealed that he falsified the fossils he claims to have discovered. The story is told from the point of view of his fourteen-year-old daughter Faith, who’s very clever but—of course—being a girl, she isn’t allowed to study even though she wants to. The family move to an island called Vane to get away from the scandal. Or at least that’s what Faith thinks. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter She discovers that her father has brought a specimen with him, which he hides in a cave. Faith follows him and sees that it’s a tree in a pot, a really small one, maybe two feet high. The tree, she finds out, is a tree that feeds on lies. So if you tell it a lie that people believe, it grows a piece of fruit, and if you eat this fruit, you go through a hallucinatory experience and discover truth in your dreams. The story becomes incredibly gothic and strange. This tree grows and grows in the sea cave. It’s hard to get there by boat and the water comes up and cuts you off and you’re stuck in this cave in the dark. The tree doesn’t like light so you have to keep your lantern really dimly lit, and it grows to completely fill this space, and there are these snaking vines all over the place, and it grows like this over the course of just a week or so. 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. Yes, definitely, and in the book there is speculation that it actually is the tree of knowledge, or came from the very first tree of knowledge. The whole thing about truth and lies refers all the way back to that. Absolutely, and I knew that, but I tried very hard not to think about it too much when I was writing At the Edge of the Orchard . I thought otherwise the symbolism would become really heavy-handed and I’d use it in a way that would just irritate people. So I tried as much as I could to keep that to a minimum, but I know that readers will have it in their minds. Yes, I’d never thought about it that way. I wonder if people who read a lot and touch pages a lot feel that extra-special connection to trees. I’ve noticed when talking to people about trees that most people’s relationship with them develops in childhood. I don’t know quite why, but I think it’s partly because when we’re young we climb them and we don’t tend to climb them as adults. There’s something when you’re actually touching it and sitting in it and hugging it and being there with it that makes you feel much more attached to a tree. Maybe the adult connection to trees is more indirect, and it’s through the pages of books."