To The Trees

Ella-Maria Nutti

A father and daughter get caught in the vast wilderness during a heavy storm and are forced to seek shelter without any way to contact help. Soon enough, they are forced to confront the silence between them and the things that stay buried.

A daughter follows her father into the winter-clad wilderness to help feed their reindeer herd. She is dealing with a broken heart and chronic pain and has a feeling her father would have preferred to go alone.

Suddenly, the snowmobile breaks down and causes them both to crash heavily onto the ground. Once they recover from the first shock, they realize that without cell reception or any other aid, they are forced to walk to the nearest shelter before they are hit by a blizzard.

During the strenuous walk, we are also walking through the daughter’s stream of thoughts, associations revoking her recent breakup and her relationship with these surroundings, or rather a sense of lack thereof. Things her father knows through inheritance and how he has never shown a will to share those things with her.

There is usually a radio on, or other people around, or the reindeer in need of attention, something filling the silence between them. But in the middle of nowhere, in the tiny shelter during a heavy storm, they are soon forced to acknowledge everything they have never said aloud.

Ella-Maria Nutti’s debut Coffee With Milk came out in 2022 and became an immediate success, praised by critics and readers alike. With over 40,000 copies sold, To the Trees is her highly anticipated second novel.