The Poinciana Tree

Elio Argenti is sixty-one years old, Italian-born, Australian-raised, a teacher of English, History, and Italian who has spent thirty-four years telling his students that other people's inner lives are real, and worth their full attention. He has moved to Brisbane - to Ascot, to a quiet apartment, to a walk that takes him south toward the river and north again along Racecourse Road - following his daughter Giulia, who has a job offer and a practical solution to a grief neither of them has named out loud. His wife Rosa died five months ago. He has not yet decided how he feels about Brisbane.
The decision is made for him on a Tuesday morning in February, when a large man in a car park calls out from a corner table beneath a Poinciana tree: You, walking past every morning. Come and have a coffee.
He turns into the car park.
The table at Café 73 has been gathering for eight years. Peter Malvey, former Rugby League player and pub owner, who holds court with the comfortable authority of a man who has always been the largest person in any room. John Peard, who ran a Far North Queensland pub for twenty-two years and is now writing a local history for no audience he can name, because the record exists, even when no one reads it. Graeme Barker, eighty-eight years old, thirty-seven years with QANTAS, renovating a Queenslander in Bardon with the same methodical precision he brought to everything. Michael Cohen, who runs a business considerably more substantial than his manner suggests, and who listens to everything with the total attention of someone mapping a territory before deciding where to stand.
They are joined over the months by others - Billy, whose trailers have covered every road in Queensland; Jamie McAllister, sheepskin tanner and drover, who arrives with two dogs and a country man's economy of words; Zoe Hargrave, an urban planner from Dalby, who comes to the café to observe its community function and stays because she cannot bring herself to leave. And Kirsty, who runs the café and brings their coffees in the same sequence every morning and who is carrying something none of them has thought to ask about.
The novel moves through a Brisbane year - Christmas carols in a timber church, food runs to the Valley, a September afternoon in Ipswich where an impromptu evening of Italian vocal music brings two hundred wedding guests to silence - tracing the quiet accumulation of what the table is and what it holds. A man named Mason arrives one morning through the café gate with a gun and the particular desperation of someone who has stopped managing, and 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.
Elsewhere, a developer has made Dimitri Spiros - who owns the building above the café - a very good offer. A young urban planner named Zoe, tasked with the community-use assessment for the development application, sits at the café twice a week for two months and finds herself unable to write the report her employer is expecting.
And Elio, who has been teaching for thirty-four years that other people's inner lives are worth your full attention, meets Vera Szakacs - Hungarian Australian soprano, van-run volunteer, a woman whose voice does something to a room that he had not found words for until she sang it - and discovers that the thing he has been teaching is still teaching him.
The Poinciana Tree is a novel about what gathers at a corner table when the same people show up, morning after morning, and decide that this is worth the hour. About the Australia built by people who came from somewhere else and chose to be accurate. About the investment - in a city, a street, a stranger's story - that never loses its value. And about a sixty-one-year-old man who walked into a car park in February and found that the most important education of his life had been waiting for him under a tree.