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The prize-winning and bestselling author of Two Trees Make a Forest turns to the lives of plants entangled in our human world to explore belonging, displacement, identity, and the truths of our shared future

A seed slips beyond a garden wall. A tree is planted on a precarious border. A shrub is stolen from its culture and its land. What happens when these plants leave their original homes and put down roots elsewhere?

The themes in these fourteen essays become invigorating and intimate in Lee’s hands, centering on the lives of plants like seaweed, tangelos, and soy, and their entanglement with our human worlds. Lee explores the rich backstory of cherry trees in Berlin; a tea plant that grows in the Himalayan foothills just southwest of China; the world of algae and wakame, and the journeys they’ve made to reach us.

Each of the plants considered in this collection are somehow perceived as being “out of place”—weeds, samples collected through imperial science, crops introduced and transformed by our hand. Lee looks at these plant species in their own context, even when we find them outside of it.

Dispersals draws a gorgeous, sprawling map of the diaspora of flora. Combining memoir, history, and scientific research in poetic prose, Jessica J. Lee meditates on the question of how both plants and people come to belong, why both cross borders, and how our futures are more entwined than we might imagine.

Jessica J. Lee's profile page

JESSICA J. LEE is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author, environmental historian, and winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, the Banff Mountain Book Award, and the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award. She is the author of Turning, Two Trees Make a Forest, and the children’s book A Garden Called Home, and co-editor of the essay collection Dog Hearted. She is the founding editor of The Willowherb Review and teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge. She lives in Berlin.

INSTANT TORONTO STAR BESTSELLER
Praise for Dispersals:

“Richly textured . . . These essays critically probe the native/nonnative paradigm of invasive-species ecology. Lee’s voice will stay with readers long after they finish this book.”
—Library Journal (starred review)

“Exquisite, haunting. . . . Lee continues her insistent, clear-eyed quest for nourishment and vitality, even when both are complicated, and encourages readers to do the same.”
—Shelf Awareness

“Lee evokes a centuries-long history of border crossings—by people and by plants—to throw into question what it means to really belong, love, and protect, and what our collective future might hold on a planet forever evolving in the wake of trans-continental migration.”
—Amy Brady, Lit Hub
“Lee does a masterful job of blending personal reflection with natural and political history, and her prose is crystalline . . . This deserves a wide audience.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The author laces her histories with a subtle and personal optimism. Just as those plants replanted far from home, we can adapt to transition, dispersal, and recollection. An insightful meditation on nature and identity within 'a world in motion.'”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Dispersals is a stunning record of inheritance, memory and belonging. Lee traces patterns . . . contending with legacies of empire and irreparable ecological change against the rhythms of everyday life as a writer and as a mother. . . . gorgeously written.”
—Nina Mingya Powles, author of Small Bodies of Water

“[A] timely, intimate and far-reaching examination of our relationship with plants through language, time, movement, placement and displacement. . . . Lee asks us ‘what it is to be a world citizen amongst species’, and shows us with stunning prose, tenderness and precision the unexpected ways that we all connect and are connected by the plants around us.”
—Amanda Thomson, author of Belonging

“A brilliant, thoughtful, complex and thought-provoking collection of essays, which expertly blend personal reflection and natural history, illuminating webs of interconnection across time and space through its sociopolitical historical-geography of plants, planting, and plant-collecting. What the words invasive or non-native plant might mean to you will be changed forever, and you will not look at the plants around you in the same way again.”
—Polly Atkin, author of Some of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better

“Lee writes lucidly about her encounters with various plant species and poses reflective questions about plants and her own sense of belonging. Memoir readers interested in plants and environmental studies especially will find a poignant meditation on the parallels between plants and human societies when it comes to life's transitions and movements.”
—Booklist
“Weaving material from literary, personal, scientific and historical sources, Lee examines plants—including seaweed and far beyond it—that broach human borders, exploring their migrations alongside her own. . . . Lee writes intimately about her own oscillating cravings for movement and rootedness against a backdrop of COVID and new motherhood. . . . Dispersals asks readers to consider how plants challenge not only spatial borders but taxonomic ones.”
—Erica Berry, Scientific American
“A thought-provoking and elegantly argued book that asks us to see the world around us anew . . . both beautifully phrased and delicately structured—this book deserves your time and attention.”
—Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment

“Beautiful . . . Lee turns her careful gaze to the easy stories we tell ourselves about foreign and native, and leaves us with a vision of the world simultaneously more nuanced and more precious.”
—Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of Starling Days
“Profound, poetic, illuminating, and moving, Dispersals' deep knowledge, sensitivity, and research (worn so lightly) addresses just how entwined our fortunes, migration and language are with plants: how much we are part of nature. Important and vivid.”
—Nicola Chester, author of On Gallows Down