Read an extract from A Dream of Trees by Samantha Sotto Yambao

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min read
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Discover the moving and hopeful novel from Sunday Times bestselling author of Water Moon, Samantha Sotto Yambao.

The door never changed, but the rooms behind it did. Small rooms. Burning rooms. Rooms that weren’t rooms at all. Shiori Ametsuchi had stopped trying to guess where the door was going to lead her next. The only certainty was that whoever she found inside those rooms was going to be dead before she left. She pressed her ear to the warm cypress planks and listened, half-convinced that she did this out of habit than hope. Only silence ever echoed through the wood.

Shiori closed her fingers around a brass doorknob that had tarnished to black.

There was no shape she knew better. She had turned it countless times and each time, it grew slick from her cold sweat. She wiped her palms over her blue gardening apron. Like the door, the apron and the ripped linen dress she wore beneath it, were a constant. She was always dressed for a day of puttering around a garden, pruning branches and snipping off dead leaves. Shiori did not mind that her clothes never changed. They kept her ready for good days when the door allowed her to spend time with her trees. On bad ones, her clothes didn’t matter. There was no appropriate attire for watching people die.

Shiori drew air deep into her lungs and held it until her chest burned. Her eyes watered. In this place where a door dictated her destination and days, She treasured the handful of things she could control. A few even served a purpose. Pain, however fleeting, was a respite from being lost. Shiori closed her eyes and counted backwards, savoring the seconds the door and its rooms retreated into the back of her mind. Sixty-three. Sixy-two. Sixty-one. Counting anchored her. When nothing else was certain, there was comfort in always knowing what number came next. Fifty-nine. Shiori exhaled a wish.

Not a child.

Not again.

Please.

Shiori pulled the door open and stepped through. A desert, and the sea, greeted her from the other side.