Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"Neither sugar-coated, nor cynical, Apricot Irving has mastered the most difficult aspect of this kind of memoir: the just-right tone of compassion and hard-earned hope. A cautionary tale for all those setting out to do good. May this gospel be read as the good news it is — a moral compass and a must read for all of us who struggle with how to create a better world.” Julia Alvarez, author of numerous novels, including, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, and Saving the World, as well as the memoir, A Wedding in Haiti
Review
“With great tenderness and a careful eye, Apricot Anderson Irving takes the reader deep into Haiti, investigating the inner lives of those who try to help the desperately poor and helpless. She explores the difficult and often unspoken side of charity, and all the ramifications of what she beautifully calls ‘the obligation to be generous.'” Aviya Kushner, author of The Grammar of God
Review
“A beautiful exploration of hope and hubris. Irving shows us the many entanglements among our relationships with the land, other cultures, and the mysteries of our own families.” David George Haskell, author of The Songs of Trees and Pulitzer finalist, The Forest Unseen
About the Author
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 6 years old; she left at the age of 15. 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.
Apricot Irving on PowellsBooks.Blog
The first draft of
The Gospel of Trees was well over a 1,000 pages, three times longer than the book contract had specified. I knew that I had to let it go. My writing studio in the woods looks down on an empty shed with a moss-covered roof, so I climbed up a ladder and set the manuscript next to the licorice ferns...
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