The One and Only Tree

A story of lying miracles, wonder and ways of the imagination.

From the bazaars of Jerusalem in the last years of the 19th century to the monasteries of Northumbria 800 years earlier, from the gates of paradise to the end of time, The One and Only Tree travels back and forth along the great east-west routes forged by crusaders, pilgrims and merchants, through seven millennia of real and imagined time, through history and make-believe. It tells the story of one of the most remarkable objects in the history of civilization – the cross on which Christ was crucified – and the story of that story: of the poets, khatibs, archaeologists, kings, painters and adventurers who have told it.

Tracing the twists and turns of the complete tale, you walk in the footsteps of the Bogomil heretics in their exile, share a hookah with a Maronite Christian through a long afternoon’s storytelling, look over the shoulder of Agnolo Gaddi as he paints the first fresco to bring all three legends together. You will discover too, the beguiling gnostic and apocryphal books of the bible that scholars are still wrestling with today, overhear a khatib in Palestine in the 1890s pointing out the pillars that supported the wood of the cross when it was a bridge in the time of Solomon, the bridge that the Queen of Sheba refused to step upon when she foresaw what it would become.

The One and Only Tree is as much about creativity as about belief. It is about our powers of invention and the well-springs of the narrative impulse, the urge to tell a story that encompasses all the world and all its hopes, a story that offers a key to a thousand years of humanity’s artistic endeavour. Absurd and magical, familiar and alien, here are tales that might have been written by Neil Gaiman or Ursula K. le Guin and they totally confound our sense of what to expect from bible stories and ancient literature. This is the story of the happy tree, the wondrous tree, the one and only noble tree.