Rhett Davis is the author of Hovering. Today we’ve got his new novel Arborescence Arborescence is the state of having the root and branch like structures of a tree. Importantly it’s a noun, but Rhett Davis asks us to imagine if it were a verb… Caelyn is at a loss. She’s bouncing between jobs that she quickly loses, like when she gets fired from a nursery for taking home the dying plants (they considered it stealing!). She hates that we’re destroying the world but feels powerless to stop it. When she hears about a group trying to become trees, she and her partner Bren go to investigate. What she finds are people standing still in a field, with a support network of others caring for them as they attempt to Arboresce. It’s a mad dream, but what if it could be true? Caelyn throws herself into studying the phenomenon and becomes the worlds foremost expert. Respect does not follow. That is until people start disappearing, while trees appear fully grown in places they shouldn’t be.  As the disappearances increase in frequency the world’s infrastructure is stretched to breaking. It’s simply not feasible to live with trees blocking streets and without the people required to run a global economy.  Caelyn insists it’s for the best, but what of those lost? For those of you who read Rhett’s debut novel Hovering, Arborescence will have you shouting ‘He’s done it again!’ (If you know you know) The very simple concept of people becoming trees metamorphosises into a narrative both sprawling and deceptively personal. What could be some strange Ent fan fiction is instead a rumination on what it means to be alive. Central to the narrative is the imperfect love story of Caelyn and Bren. Through them we are shown contrasting views of this world in flux, alongside a kind of model for how to respectfully disagree without being awful Bren’s own job as a manager to a possibly AI workforce serves as a counterpoint to Caelyn’s increasing fervour about the Arborescent population. It also injects some dark humour into the possibility that we will be ruled one day by our computer overlords.   It arises through the narrative that becoming a tree is a very human thing to do. Or more appropriately the sense of purpose and the wish to be a force for good is what makes it human. Within this space we must contend with the morality of our responsibilities to each other as social creatures and our responsibilities as the nominal stewards of the world in which we live. It’s a muddy question and this is not your grandparents' apocalypse. I’m trying to have fun with this review because I had an enormous amount of fun reading Arborescence. And because it’s a book that will take me some time to process and figure out what I truly took from it. That’s not a bad thing but it does present a problem for filing copy. Suffice to say that Rhett Davis has crafted an intellectually challenging novel with an intriguing concept and a personal, relatable soul. It’s the sort of novel I hope to find and I’m excited to be recommending it to all of you.