Tree of Strangers
By Barbara Sumner
$35.00
Massey University Press
'I live at the end of a gravel road at the top of a valley consumed by bush. My husband is here and my three girls. But the bush swallows them up like the road'. I wrote those words at the kitchen table in 1983. A letter to the mother I’d never met. But how do you convey your life in a few sentences when almost every memory is missing?
What does it mean to grow up adopted in New Zealand?
How do you make a life when there is no history to build from ?
Remarkable, moving, beautifully written, Tree of Strangers is a gripping account of a search for identity in a country governed by adoption laws that deny the rights of the adopted person.
Reviews
Exquisitely captured
“Completely riveting, wonderfully written, engaging on every level. I have lingered over it, absorbing and marvelling at the writers’ use of language, her honesty, her exquisitely captured sorrow and pain. ”
A massive success, one that had me in tears by its end
“From the opening lines, Barbara Sumner’s Tree of Strangers gripped me on the level of its brilliantly evoked personal story.
This is an author whose intensely visual grasp can do what other books only promise, it actually does transport the reader into scenes and situations so vividly described that they feel like one’s own lived experience.
Here is a privileged journey into a life and a life-long quest born of pain, and full of drama and mystery. That mystery keeps the reader (arguably traps them into) compulsively turning the pages, Barbara’s need to know more about herself, her beginnings, her family becomes our own compulsion.
Tree of Strangers has a lot more on its mind than just Barbara’s own personal story, it takes aim at the whole edifice of stranger adoption and in doing so gives the long-buried other side of a story almost as old as our society, overturning assumptions and pressing on bruises most of us have never stopped to imagine might exist.
Reading Tree of Strangers is to be assailed by revelations legal, moral, narrative and emotional. To say it stays with you is an understatement.”
This is a story that lingers long after you’ve finished reading it
“I opened Tree of Strangers with high expectations of a well-told story that would entertain me.
Once I started however, I could not stop reading. I finished the book in the early hours and thinking about what I read kept me awake for most of the night. I think about it still.
Barbara Sumner’s Tree of Strangers doesn’t simply tell a remarkable story, it shines a harsh light on the way that our society has completely failed to accord the most basic of human rights to adopted children in New Zealand, the right to know who you are and where you are from.”