The Fish in the Tree

In the winter of 1974, Edie is on the rebound after breaking up with her hippy boyfriend and is suddenly swept off her feet by Kamal Shariff, a Malaysian lawyer she meets in Edinburgh.

Thrilled at the prospect of a more exciting way of life, Edie travels with Kamal to his homeland and finds herself immersed in a country more exotic than she could have imagined. She faces the challenges arising from a marriage between two races, cultures and religions, whilst also learning to integrate into both the indigenous and expatriate communities each with wildly different values.

Unprecedented events link Edie back to her father’s family in Scotland. How does she reconcile her life in Kota Kinabalu with that of her father and grandmother who lived on Scotland’s north-east coast? How can the aftermath of a murder in a Glasgow tenement have such a profound impression on Edie? By understanding the mysteries of the past, Edie manages to come to terms with her own devastating grief.

Malaysia and the island of Borneo provide the background to a story of an impressionable young woman’s journey from Scotland to South-East Asia and where, with her quiet sense of purpose, she is able to find the happiness she craves.

Gael Harrison was born in Malaysia and attended a boarding school on Penang Hill for three years before going home to Scotland where she attended boarding school and qualified as a teacher. She also gained a Fine Arts degree at the Open University.

In the 1980s she returned to Scotland where she and her family lived in a village overlooking the Isle of Skye. In 2001 she took up the challenge of VSO and spent a year in the Vietnamese mountains close to the Chinese border, and three further years working in the UN International School in Hanoi.

She has worked in Ukraine and Qatar and, always keen to learn about different peoples and cultures, has travelled extensively overseas. Her books reflect her particular love of Scotland and Malaysia, the two countries that have most strongly influenced her. Gael now lives with her husband in North Queensferry, Scotland.