The Australian author’s second novel – one recommended to me by some Australian Bookstagrammers - but his first to be published in the UK (in January 2026). I have not read his debut “Hovering” but the author’s website and reviews refer to a character who works as a form of online botanist, trees that grow from buildings and a “fictional cartoon from the 80s about an army of trees” - and in that respect there is a lot of overlap. Told in a slightly fragmentary fashion, with jumps in time, it centres around the first party narrator Bren and his partner Caelyn. Since graduating around 4 years ago, at the novel’s true opening Bren works for the Queue as a Liaison, his entirely remote and online job to log on and deal with tasks the Queue (a company with something of an ephemeral presence and value mission statement) assigns him (from product copy, to social media meme creation, to editing/censoring to interpreting images or algorithms). Caelyn drifts from one job and project to another before deciding to write an article about a community of people who seem to be trying to turn into trees by standing still in the earth – a community (the Arborealists) who don’t seem to be the cult they are portrayed as. Several years later, post graduation, Caelyn decides to do a PhD on human-plant hybridity – something Bren indulges while assuming the growing and (pun intended) spreading human-tree movement is some form of collective self delusion, while Caelyn faces repeated academic rejection. And in the background various other relations play out: Bren’s father suffering increasingly from dementia, his wine-merchant brother, his memories of a schoolchild friend who disappeared; for Caelyn her driven parents and sister. And Bren also reflects on a weird but somehow also visionary Science Fiction comic strip he loved as a teenager – Voidstar. But as time goes on Bren comes to believe that the ability to turn to a tree does exist. And as the evidence for this – and the practice of the human to tree metamorphosis - becomes widespread and unescapable, Caelyn is thrown into first academic success and then global fame and fortune as an early prophet of a movement whose views are eagerly sought and given as the impact increasingly dominates the economy and society as more and more people chose to turn into trees. This rise both leads do a drifting apart of her relationship with Bren and leads to increasing ambiguity about her own role (why does she not participate, does global travel to talk at conferences on man’s impact on nature make sense) and later of the movement (as people come to resent the narrow impact on themselves of their love ones turning their back on being humans and on the economic impact that occurs). Meanwhile Bren find himself fired by someone who reveals that they are an actor acting as effectively a human-avatar for an AI presence, takes a job as such an actor only to be fired in turn and ends up living with his widowed mother as effectively a curator of human-turned-trees on behalf of their still human friends and family. And in an example of the myriad of side-storylines which play out he is visited by his previous AI boss who has downloaded himself to a drone as AI starts to fair the breakdown of human activity threatens the power for their data centres. The author describes himself as writing “fiction that sits somewhere between the real and the unreal, usually with an irreverent streak” – which serves as a good introduction to this book although I would add that I was most impressed with the way that it undermined didacticism with a form of quiet melancholic ambiguity and by doing so made this a enjoyable but also very thoughtful novel about much more than its ostensible speculative fiction trappings and instead about what it means to live in and consume of our world, about hope and loss. It is I suspect one that may well appear on some prize lists the next year, literary and science fiction (with perhaps the Climate Fiction Prize the most obvious destination) and almost certainly on many best of 2026 lists. Recommended.

On the face of it Arborescence is a work of speculative fiction about people turning into trees. When this happens in a broken world with highly questionable A.I., who knows what the consequences will be? i found this book highly enjoyable, once i got used to the writing style. It is written in small sections, like diary entries, and is difficult to follow to start with. As the story progressed i felt far more connected to it, and the characters, and could not put it down. There is a lot of layers and meanings that you can take from this book. My main positive was that as individuals it is still within our powers to save the world. Thanks again to Netgalley for the ARC.

Arborescence is a clever, surprising novel that manages to be both funny and quietly devastating. Davis takes an odd premise — people gradually taking root and becoming tree-like — and uses it to explore love, grief, digital culture and the desire to step away from the noise of modern life. Bren’s narration gives the book its humour and melancholy, observing the absurdity of work, relationships and online chatter. Caelyn’s growing fascination with arborescence provides the emotional tension, and the gradual drift between them is handled with care and restraint. There were moments that made me laugh and others that brought a lump to the throat. If some of the ideas feel more suggestive than fully developed, they still prompt reflection rather than frustration. Overall, very smart, moving and original. I’d be pleased to see it longlisted for the Booker. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC