2024 CBCA Book of the Year Awards, Notable List. A man approaches a tree with an axe and the tree speaks to him. What ensues is a conversation in which the man tries to show the tree what a real world consists of. He points out the roads, the buildings, the ships and supermarkets but what he sees is his own loneliness amidst them. In quiet response, the tree reveals the deep and sustaining complexity and vitality of the 'world' it houses.Set at an imagined edge of the city and the natural world, this story asks what have we become possessed by and consequentially, what have we forgotten?