Up High in the Trees: A Novel

(Paperback)

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This is an exquisite debut novel about a family in turmoil, told in the startling, deeply affecting voice of a nine-year-old, autistic boy. Following the sudden death of Sebby's mother, his father takes Sebby to live in the family's summerhouse, hoping it will give them both time and space to recover. But Sebby's father deteriorates in this new isolation, leaving Sebby struggling to understand his mother's death alone, dreaming and even reliving moments of her life. He ultimately reaches out to a favorite teacher back home and to two nearby children who force him out of the void of the past and help him to exist in the present. In spare and gorgeous prose buoyed by the life force of its small, fearless narrator, Up High in the Trees introduces an astonishingly fresh and powerful literary voice.

Reviews

"An astonishing debut by a gifted young writer. Up High in the Trees captures, pitch-perfectly, the voice of one autistic nine-year-old boy. That the story is also compelling, beautifully written, humorous, and heartbreaking makes it necessary reading. Sebby Lane is a Little Prince for our times." -- Cristina Garcia
"This is a very moving and perfectly convincing portrait of the inner life of an unusual boy, Sebby, cast into the deep black waters of a mother's death. As his family thrashes and drowns and treads water around him, he has to choose if and how to survive. Brinkman's portrait of Sebby and his family is humane and uncompromising, never maudlin, and, in the end, we root for Sebby as if he were our own." -- Dave Eggers
"Up High in the Trees is a hauntingly beautiful debut, a stunner. Klara Brinkman has masterfully created an enchanting, poignant, and wholly original child narrator out of taut, spooky, electric sentences and elegant, musical concisions. The most remarkable thing is that you don't, at first, notice the razor-sharp precision of Brinkman's technique; the book is so vibrant, so alive, It's as if she's channeling this nine-year-old boy and his visceral, riveting, often terrifying, depiction of the otherworld that is childhood." -- Maud Casey
"Up High in the Trees is a visceral, heart-wrenching, gorgeous book. What moves me most about Brinkman's first novel is the voice: It's pitch-perfect and mesmerizing. With Up High in the Trees Brinkman has created a fully realized, wholly original, and powerfully felt world." -- Alison Smith