It’s 2049, and Daniel Connelly, 75, is an eccentric loner who spends his days making sculptures from broken pottery - because who needs friends when you have shards? His spartan existence is disrupted when a longan tree, a family heirloom of belonging, falls in a storm. Mirandi Riwoe’s novel is not really Daniel’s story; it’s a multigenerational epic tracing how that tree got there, starting with bushranger Ah Yang in 1850s Queanbeyan. The book hops across 200 years and four perspectives: Daniel in 2049; his aunt Wendy, who has early-onset Alzheimer’s in the early 2000s; great-aunt Ruby, a Chinese Australian actor struggling in 1950s Hollywood; and great-great-great-grandmother Maria, the matriarch from the 1850s. It explores Chinese Australian experiences and the nuances of race, gender, and immigration. The structure initially seems seasonal - winter, autumn, summer, spring - but then unravels like a family tree that becomes a living organism. Riwoe focuses on older characters in transformation, which is refreshing in a world obsessed with youthful self-discovery. Wendy, forgetting her life, feels “the narrowing fragments of time bearing down upon her” and actively chooses to leave behind shame and regret. The novel excels at intergenerational memory and trauma, with lines like “the shame you speak of is counterfeit, my darling.” At nearly 300 pages, I devoured it in one sitting. The prose is dense and lovely, occasionally overlong, but Riwoe’s command of language is undeniable. Some segments feel simplified - Ruby’s Hollywood career, for instance - but the characters are so well inhabited that even those moments entertain. The book is a profound meditation on connection and continuity, but also pain and loneliness. Like Daniel’s sculptures, it’s assembled from fragments, each with sharp edges, creating a family portrait that feels lived over two centuries.