The Poinciana Tree: One Table. The Stories Australia Made. (en Inglés)
Reseña del libro "The Poinciana Tree: One Table. The Stories Australia Made. (en Inglés)"
Five months after losing his wife, Elio Argenti has learned to keep moving. Walk south to the river. Walk north along Racecourse Road. Don't stop. On a Tuesday morning in February, a large man called out from a corner table under a Poinciana tree — and Elio made the best wrong turn of his life. He is sixty-one. Italian-born, Australian-raised, a teacher of English and History and Italian who has spent thirty-four years telling students that other people's inner lives are real and worth their full attention. He knows this. He teaches it. He has not yet learned to apply it to himself. He has followed his daughter Giulia to Brisbane because she has a job offer and a practical solution to a grief that neither of them has named out loud. He does not yet know if Brisbane is the right place. He has not yet decided anything. Then he turns into the car park. The table at Café 73 has been gathering for eight years beneath a Poinciana tree in Ascot. Around it: A former Rugby League player who holds court with the ease of a man always the largest in the room A Far North Queensland publican writing a local history for no audience in particular, because the record matters even when no one reads it An eighty-eight-year-old QANTAS veteran renovating a Queenslander with the same precision he brought to every flight plan he ever filed A businessman who listens to everything with the careful attention of someone mapping territory before deciding where to stand Over the months that follow, they are joined by a drover with two dogs and a country man's economy of words, an urban planner sent to assess the café's community value who finds herself unable to write the report her employer is waiting for, and Kirsty — who runs the café, brings their coffees in the same order every morning, and is carrying something none of them has thought to ask about yet. This is the Australia built quietly, by people who came from somewhere else and chose to stay and pay attention. Then a man named Mason walks through the gate one morning with a gun and the particular desperation of someone who has stopped managing. The men at the table respond with the collective calm of people who have been sitting together long enough to know, without discussion, exactly what to do. And then there is Vera. Hungarian-Australian soprano. Van-run volunteer. A woman whose voice does something to a room that Elio — after thirty-four years of teaching people to find words — cannot find the words for. The Poinciana Tree is a novel about what gathers when the same people show up, morning after morning, and decide that this is worth the hour. About grief that travels with you until it doesn't. About community found sideways, in a car park, under a tree, when you were only trying to keep moving. For readers of Fredrik Backman, Richard Osman, and Graeme Simsion. For everyone who has ever been saved, quietly and completely, by a table of strangers. Scroll up and take a seat.
