Tree of Strangers

'I live at the end of a gravel road at the top of a valley consumed by bush. My husband is here, and my three girls. But the bush swallows them up like the road.' I wrote those words at the kitchen table in 1983. A letter to the mother I'd never met. But how do you convey your life in a few sentences when almost every memory is missing?

Barbara Sumner grew up in a family filled with secrets and lies. At twenty-three she decided she had to find her mother. Remarkable, moving, beautifully writ...