From the canon

Where Branches Meet

A secret buried beneath a sixteenth-century Irish friary reaches across centuries, drawing together family branches divided by migration, war and generations of silence.

Book summary

Read Chapter 1 free

1537-1689, 1950-1972

The third novel follows Jack MacKail, Francesca Ricci and their son Joe through the decades after the Second World War. Naples becomes the centre of a new family world shaped by Italian kinship, American memory and Joe’s growing musical ability.

As Joe develops from a gifted child into the creative force behind The Compass, the family’s scattered history begins to converge. Objects recovered from the past—including journals, a portrait and an impossible early photograph—link modern lives to people long believed lost.

At its centre is Joe’s attempt to create something new without severing himself from the histories that made him.

Available now

Introductory offer ends 30 November 2026

Where Branches Meet

£0.99 (introductory price)

Bundle — Books 1–4

£2.99 (introductory price)

Bundle — All nine novels

£6.99 (introductory price)

The novels

Enter the canon

Book One of The Trees from Ashes Saga

Roots
in the Ash

1686-1849

From the Jacobite age to the discovery of a hidden family legacy, the opening novel follows the MacKails through rebellion, exile, execution and survival as one Irish farm becomes the keeper of truths that generations fail to understand.

Discover the book →

Book Two of The Trees from Ashes Saga

Shoots
from the Ash

1849-1950

The family story crosses Russia, Ireland and America as revolution, Titanic and two world wars reshape the descendants of Killiecrankie Farm. Survival brings new homes, but inherited secrets continue to travel with them.

Discover the book →

Book Three of The Trees from Ashes Saga

Where
Branches Meet

1537-1689, 1950-1972

In post-war Naples, Joe MacKail’s gift for music creates a life his ancestors could never have imagined. As separated branches of the family draw together, old objects and unfinished stories acquire new meaning.

Discover the book →

Book Four of The Trees from Ashes Saga

Fruits
from the Ash

1973-1986

Rosanna MacKail emerges from private grief into international fame, love and motherhood. Yet the past remains present in her music, her family and the questions that follow her from Italy to Ireland and Leningrad.

Discover the book →

Book Five of The Trees from Ashes Saga

House of
the Half-Told

1751-1813

Declan MacKail inherits a farm shadowed by his father’s execution and by truths deliberately withheld. His first-person account reveals the private cost of keeping a family alive when its history can never be told whole.

Discover the book →

Book Six of The Trees from Ashes Saga

A Name
in Cyrillic

1793-1874

Fleeing revolutionary Paris, Rory MacKail reaches Russia and builds a household beneath another form of his name. Science, love and exile give him a future, but never release him entirely from the family that believes him dead.

Discover the book →

Book Seven of The Trees from Ashes Saga

The Son
Without a Name

1740-1751

Lucien Alexandre Morel is born in France with his mother’s surname and Robbie MacKail’s blood. Denied the MacKail name, he grows into the shadow of a father whose ambition has already begun to corrupt An Scáth Dorcha, drawing him towards Ireland, inheritance and a legacy built on secrecy.

Discover the book →

Book Eight of The Trees from Ashes Saga

The Stone
Before the Ash

1265–1340, 1675

Before MacKail Croft, before Killiecrankie Farm, before the ashes, one family’s story begins with a broken oath, a threatened claim, and a stone raised against forgetting.

Discover the book →

Book Nine of The Trees from Ashes Saga

Woman
in the Frame

1990-1993

Rosanna MacKail-Jones enters the world of cinema, where a public image can preserve, distort or conceal the woman behind it. Fame opens another chapter in the canon while testing marriage, identity and artistic loyalty.

Discover the book →