Lucy Ferriss is the author of ten books, mostly fiction. Her novel A Sister to Honor, set partly in northern Pakistan, was a WNBA 2015 Great Group Read; her novel The Lost Daughter was a Book–of-the-Month pick; and her memoir, Unveiling the Prophet, was named Best Book of the Year by the Riverfront Times. Recent short fiction and essays appear in The American Scholar, The New York Times, Missouri Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Arts & Letters, and weekly at the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Lingua Franca. She lives in the Berkshires and Connecticut, where she is Writer-in-Residence at Trinity College.
The ostensible arc of The Poison Tree takes us from a child’s domination by a ruthless, unyielding father to a successful adult’s enlightenment and forgiveness. But the actual course of the narrative is less straightforward and, as with the poem from which it takes its inspiration, far more unexpected in its outcomes.