The Tree of the Sun

The Tree of the Sun, first published in 1978, begins where Wilson Harris's previous novel Da Silva da Silva's Cultivated Wilderness ended, and thus forms a sequel. The London-dwelling Brazilian painter Da Silva is deeply moved by his wife's pregnancy after eight years of marriage. As he contemplates the child to be born he recalls a painting he began on the very morning he and his wife made love and conception occurred: a painting that contained a growing image. This becomes the evolving 'foetus' of imagination through which Da Silva begins to relate himself and his wife to the former (childless) tenants of their Kensington flat. 'I must admire the imagination and force of Wilson Harris' writing.' Kevin Cully, Tribune

Sir Wilson Harris was a prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist, and lecturer. Born in 1921 in British Guiana, his father died when he was two and his stepfather disappeared into the rainforests in 1929. He began working as a government surveyor in 1942 and led expeditions into the Amazonian interior for almost 15 years. In 1959 he left for England to become a full-time writer. The following year, Faber published his debut novel, Palace of the Peacock, which became a landmark of Caribbean literature and the first of The Guyana Quartet. Over the course of his career, Faber published all 26 of Harris' novels, including The Carnival Trilogy, Jonestown, The Mask of the Beggar, and The Ghost of Memory. Harris was awarded numerous academic fellowships and honorary doctorates as well as being a Guggenheim Fellow. He twice won the Guyana Prize for Literature as well as a Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. Harris was knighted in 2010, and died in 2018 at the age of 96.