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The Poinciana Tree: One Table. The Stories Australia Made.
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 22 2026
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.77
Height: 0.72 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Five months after losing his wife, Elio Argenti has learned to
keep moving. Walk south to the river. Walk north along Racecourse Road.
Don't stop. On a Tuesday morning in February, a large man called out
from a corner table under a Poinciana tree - and Elio made the best
wrong turn of his life.
He is sixty-one. Italian-born, Australian-raised, a teacher of
English and History and Italian who has spent thirty-four years telling
students that other people's inner lives are real and worth their full
attention. He knows this. He teaches it. He has not yet learned to
apply it to himself.
He has followed his daughter Giulia to Brisbane because she has a
job offer and a practical solution to a grief that neither of them has
named out loud. He does not yet know if Brisbane is the right place.
He has not yet decided anything.
Then he turns into the car park.
The table at Café 73 has been gathering for eight years beneath a
Poinciana tree in Ascot. Around it:
- A former Rugby League player who holds court with the ease of a
man always the largest in the room - A Far North Queensland publican writing a local history for no
audience in particular, because the record matters even when no one
reads it - An eighty-eight-year-old QANTAS veteran renovating a Queenslander
with the same precision he brought to every flight plan he ever filed - A businessman who listens to everything with the careful attention
of someone mapping territory before deciding where to stand
Over the months that follow, they are joined by a drover with two
dogs and a country man's economy of words, an urban planner sent to
assess the café's community value who finds herself unable to write the
report her employer is waiting for, and Kirsty - who runs the café,
brings their coffees in the same order every morning, and is carrying
something none of them has thought to ask about yet.
This is the Australia built quietly, by people who came from
somewhere else and chose to stay and pay attention.
Then a man named Mason walks through the gate one morning with a gun
and the particular desperation of someone who has stopped managing. The
men at the table respond with the collective calm of people who have
been sitting together long enough to know, without discussion, exactly
what to do.
And then there is Vera. Hungarian-Australian soprano. Van-run
volunteer. A woman whose voice does something to a room that Elio -
after thirty-four years of teaching people to find words - cannot find
the words for.
The Poinciana Tree is a novel about what gathers when the
same people show up, morning after morning, and decide that this is
worth the hour. About grief that travels with you until it doesn't.
About community found sideways, in a car park, under a tree, when you
were only trying to keep moving.
For readers of Fredrik Backman, Richard Osman, and Graeme Simsion.
For everyone who has ever been saved, quietly and completely, by a
table of strangers.
Scroll up and take a seat.
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