-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
A Memoir
by Apricot Irving
In this compelling, beautiful memoir, award-winning writer Apricot Irving recounts her childhood as a missionary's daughter in Haiti during a time of upheaval - both in the country and in her home.
Apricot Irving grew up as a missionary's daughter in Haiti - a country easy to sensationalize but difficult to understand. Her father was an agronomist, a man who hiked alone into the hills with a macouti of seeds to preach the gospel of trees in a deforested but resilient country. Her mother and sisters, meanwhile, spent most of their days in the confines of the hospital compound they called home. As a child, this felt like paradise to Irving; as a teenager, the same setting felt like a prison. Outside of the walls of the missionary enclave, Haiti was a tumult of bugle-call bus horns and bicycles that jangled over hard-packed dirt, the clamor of chickens and cicadas, the sudden, insistent clatter of rain as it hammered across tin roofs and the swell of voices running ahead of the storm.
As she emerges into womanhood, an already confusing process made all the more complicated by Christianity's demands, Irving struggles to understand her father's choices. His unswerving commitment to his mission, and the anger and despair that followed failed enterprises, threatened to splinter his family.
Beautiful, poignant, and explosive, The Gospel of Trees is the story of a family crushed by ideals, and restored to kindness by honesty. Told against the backdrop of Haiti's long history of intervention - often unwelcome - it grapples with the complicated legacy of those who wish to improve the world. Drawing from family letters, cassette tapes, journals, and interviews, it is an exploration of missionary culpability and idealism, told from within.
"Starred Review. This is a beautiful memoir that shows how a family altered by its own ambitious philanthropy might ultimately find hope in their faith and love for each other, and for Haiti." - Publishers Weekly
"A timely and often insightful perspective on modern-day Haiti woven into an overlong and banal family saga." - Kirkus
"Best suited to serious readers interested in Haiti or the lives of missionary children and families." - Library Journal
This information about The Gospel of Trees was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Apricot Anderson Irving is currently based in the woods outside Portland, Oregon, but has lived in Haiti, Indonesia, and the UK. Her missionary parents moved to Haiti when she was six years old; she left at the age of fifteen. She returned to Haiti in the spring of 2010 to cover the earthquake for the radio program This American Life. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award and an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship. Her renowned oral history project, BoiseVoices.com, was a collaboration between youth and elders to record the stories of a neighborhood in the midst of gentrification. She loves to garden, and on rare occasions she can be persuaded to belt out Irish folk songs in bars. The Gospel of Trees is her first book.
If you liked The Gospel of Trees, try these:
by Quiara Alegría. Hudes
Published 2025
The story of a runaway mother's ten days of freedom—and the pain, desire, longing, and wonder we find on the messy road to enlightenment—from Pulitzer Prize winner Quiara Alegría Hudes.
by John Manuel. Arias
Published 2024
A lush and lyrical debut novel about a Costa Rican family wrestling with a deadly secret, from rising literary star John Manuel Arias
by Elif Shafak
Published 2023
A rich, magical new novel on belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal, from the Booker-shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World.
Theo of Golden by Allen Levi
One spring morning, a stranger arrives in the small southern city of Golden. No one knows where he has come from…or why…
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
