In the Name of the Trees is the new novel by award-winning Filipina writer and performer Merlinda Bobis. The book traverses four generations of women who endure war, colonisation, and displacement—sustained by memory and the language of trees.

In the name of the trees, I retrieve you from hurt and sickness.

In a Philippine ritual of retrieval, Lola Narra tries to heal her granddaughter Dao who was paralysed in an accident that killed her father. They live in Canberra, far from the healing trees of their first home in the village of Iláwod where the story began. But between the Philippines and Australia, the land knows, the trees know: wound on wound on wound—lugad sa lugad sa lugad. Such is the colonial inheritance of four generations of Filipinas named after trees: Banaba, Narra, Pili and Dao. Their rifts are deep, their heartbreaks more wounding. They tell stories to hide, evade, or make truth bearable. But trees remember. They do not lie.

About the author
Merlinda Bobis is the author of four novels, two books of short fiction and six collections of poetry. Her novel Locust Girl, a Lovesong won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the Philippine National Book Award in 2016. It has been translated to Tamil and is currently awaiting the publication of its Italian translation. The Kindness of Birds received the Canberra Critics' Circle Award in 2021. It was shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize and the Steele Rudd Award, and was Highly Commended for the ACT Book of the Year in 2022. She is the recipient of numerous other awards in Australia, Philippines, US and Italy. In 2025 she was named as one of the top 10 female novelists shaping the literary scene in Southeast Asia. She regards her writing as a homecoming: a return to roots, a retrieval through memory, and a reckoning with loss, hopefully with care and grace. She lives and writes on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country (Canberra). 

Praise for Merlinda Bobis

Merlinda Bobis is a writer whose work transcends … [her] writing, in both her poetry and her prose fiction, is at once reassuring and uncomfortable; it quietly sears as it sings. 
—Sydney Review of Books

 Bobis is a stroyteller whose work draws on the ancient Pacific talkstory tradition yet also blasts it apart with exciting new sounds and justapositions, She is always issuing a challenge to the reader – a haka from the pen.
—New Fiction from the Pacific

Published by Spinifex Press
October 2025 
ISBN 9781922964281
Paperback
152 mm x 229 mm
160 pages