Jessica J. Lee - Two Trees Make a Forest: Travels Among Taiwans Mountains & Coasts in Search of My Familys Past

Praise for Two Trees Make a Forest

A New Statesman Book of the Year

Two Trees Make a Forest is a finely faceted meditation on memory, love, landscapeand finding a home in language. Its short, shining sections tilt yearningly toward one another; in form as well as content, this is a beautiful book about the distance between people and between places, and the means of their bridging.

ROBERT MACFARLANE , author of Underland

Jessica J. Lee shows in this book how a delicate interrogation of language and place can be critical to understanding where we are going.

BONNIE TSUI , author of Why We Swim

A subtle, powerful exploration of the relationship between people and place, and a luminous evocation of an extraordinary landscape.

MELISSA HARRISON , author of All Among the Barley

Both clear-eyed and tenderhearted, Two Trees Make a Forest is a profound and gorgeously written meditation on the natural and familial environments that shape us. Jessica J. Lee is a poetic talent keenly attentive to the mysterious and sublime.

SHARLENE TEO , author of Ponti

Two Trees Make a Forest takes a twisting path through mountain passes, over tree roots, by spoon-billed birds, and into a familys past. In this thoughtful memoir, Lee asks the reader to wonder, What makes a homeland? Is it language, family, landscape? I was left with a full heart and a longing to learn the name of each tree that lines my own past.

ROWAN HISAYO BUCHANAN , author of Starling Days

There is so much loss in this family storyand in many family storiesand Lee has portrayed it with detail and restraint. Lee describes the complexities and anxieties of identity and language in a way that I know will have resonance with many readers, especially those with scattered families, disparate backgrounds. A beautiful, fully realized tribute to a family, and a brave, diligent search for understanding in the mist.

AMY LIPTROT , author of The Outrun

Two Trees Make a Forest is a stunning book. It is full of family, longing, ghosts, and landscapes, all of which, in Lees deft and beautiful telling, invoke the complications of belonging to worlds both human and natural. Lees writing is alive equally to the details of forests and to the daily lives of her parents and grandparents. The narrative emerges out of Taiwans mists layer by layer, reminding us how place, experience, memory, and the bones of the earth remake one over time. A powerful meditation on the forces that shape our lives, from bedrock to the language we use to describe it.

BATHSHEBA DEMUTH , author of Floating Coast

Praise for Turning

National Post (Canada), 1 of the 99 Best Books of the Year

One of Die Zeit s Best Books of the Year

A Notable Selection of the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Awards

Long-listed for the Frank Hegyi Award for Emerging Authors

A sublime, philosophical slipping into the deep. Her book, Turning, is filled with a wonderful melancholy as she swims through lakes laden with dark histories.

PHILIP HOARE , New Statesman

A brilliant debutThere is clarity and pleasure in the swims afterglow.

HARRIET BAKER , The Times Literary Supplement

Turning is many things: a snapshot of Berlin seen through the prism of its lakes; the story of a broken and healing heart; a contemplation of identity; a coming-of-age story.

KATHARINE NORBURY , The Observer

Bold and brave, she approaches her watery pilgrimage with a minimum amount of fuss. She doesnt, for instance, allow the ice on Brandenburgs lakes to get in her way, but takes a hammer to itLee writes like a siren, her silken prose blending with softly worn scholarship to enchanting effect. I challenge anyone to write more compellingly about Slavic suffixes or the formation of ice.

OLIVER BALCH , Literary Review

A lovely, poetic, sensuous and melancholy book.

JOSEPHINE FENTON , Irish Examiner

The redemptive power of these wild landscapes, the changes in the water, and in Jessica, combine to create an inspiring story.

The Daily Telegraph

Jessica J. Lees first book is lyrical and profound, toldin stunning prose and with poetic flare; its poignant and moving and passionateA lexeme masterpieceWafting sweetly even through the weighty bits, her musings as steady and tender in sadness as learned peace. Too intimate to be comfortable, but told with a piercing vulnerability so affecting you wind up feeling close to Lee anyway, side-by-side and stroke-by-stroke, solidarity in life and lake and existential slog, 52 times over, together better for it.

TERRA ARNONE , National Post (Canada)

Lee is an elegant writer; precise in her description, thoughtful in her observation, and most of all interested in the world that surrounds herJessica J. Lees is a trip to the lake well worth taking, inspiring even this reluctant swimmer to reach for his swimming shorts.

PAUL SCRATON , Elsewhere

[Lees] beautifully written memoir combines personal memories with geographic and historical observations that should resonate even for staunch landlubbers.

Metro

I loved this beautiful book. Its an attentive meditation on the pleasures and lessons of swimming in lakes, particularly in winter. Jessica J. Lee wears her bravery lightly and shares her knowledge with generosity. I recommend for outdoor swimmers or those who would like to be.

AMY LIPTROT , author of The Outrun

Jessica J. Lee is a writer of rare and exhilarating grace. In Turning, she sounds the depths of lakes and her own life, never flinching from darkness, surfacing to fresh understandings of her place in the welter of natural and human history. A beautiful, moody, bracing debut.

KATE HARRIS , author of Lands of Lost Borders

A deeply moving meditation on solitude, yearning, loss, and love. This lake of a book submerged and enveloped me. It is a truly beautiful offering.

KYO MACLEAR , author of Birds Art Life

Lees language is sharp as ice on a frozen lake. Its astounding how, to explore her past and her own shifting identity, she uses the land as a metaphor but tempers it with a view of yearning, the sight of someone once removed who can never really go back home again. Insightful, unconventional, moving, and inspiring, I think this book will appeal to anyone who has ever struggled across the darkness trying to find the light.

YASUKO THANH , author of Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains

ALSO BY JESSICA J. LEE

Turning: A Year in the Water

HAMISH HAMILTON an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

Canada USA UK Ireland Australia New Zealand India South Africa China

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Virago Press, an imprint of Little Brown Group Published in Hamish Hamilton paperback by Penguin Canada, 2020 Simultaneously published in the United States by Catapult Books

Copyright 2020 by Jessica J. Lee

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.