The Family Tree - Hardcover

Tepper, Sheri S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0380974789 ISBN 13: 9780380974788

Publisher: Avon Books, 1997

Synopsis

Investigating three bizarre and apparently unrelated murders, officer Dora Henry is baffled when trees sprout overnight and turn the city into a teeming jungle, revealing to Dora strange clues about the killings and about the future.

About this title

Review:

This technically polished novel ingeniously combines elements from traditional quests, fables, and novels. A seemingly rhetorical question is posed in chapter 1: Why did sociable, smart Dora Henry marry cold, controlling Jared Gerber? But that question is the key to the book and to the parallel stories told by Sheri Tepper. The sets of characters unravel their separate puzzles until all become different aspects of the same web of events, shaking the reader's, and Dora's, perceptions to the core. Tepper's linguistic sleight-of-hand with metaphor and image is breathtaking; her storytelling is deft and funny; her characters are memorable and sympathetic. Topical, mythical, archetypal, and provocative, this is a book no fantasy or science fiction reader should miss.

Review:

From reviews of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall:

‘The Women’s Room invaded by Big Brother. A provocative, devastating, enthralling consciousness raiser’
Kirkus Reviews

‘Visceral and arresting. Curl up with it’
FT

‘Opening as near-future realism, the novel metamorphoses into a mythical telling of the struggle between those who desire domination and the forces of balance and harmony.’
New Scientist

‘As always, Tepper creates excellent female characters transported by a swiftly flowing plot’
PW

‘Tepper never forgets to give the reader a gripping story on which to hang the serious concerns that lie at the root of her books... she shows how taking responsibility for one’s own life and actions can become a kind of butterfly effect’
Fantasy and Science Fiction

About this edition

• Publisher: Avon Books
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0380974789
• ISBN 13: 9780380974788
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 377