The Mango Tree

The Mango Tree follows the life of Ramiro Valenzuela, an indigenous Yaqui native, as he embarks on a wild journey that takes him from his homeland in Mexico to the United States, Italy, Greece, the UK, and Canada. Rising out of poverty and through the ranks of post-WWII academia, Ramiro grapples with existential questions of power, identity, climate change, and how to live a meaningful life amid the beauty and terror of an ever-changing world. What follows is a dreamlike tale of nature and man, rendered with lyrical grace and deep, elegiac resonance.

Through the voices of Ramiro and the characters he encounters-including his grandfather, Felipe, enslaved by the Díaz regime; Kurt, a Nazi U-boat captain marooned in Mexico; Mike, a soldier-turned-artist in Italy; and the titular Mango Tree-Cabot tells the story of the twentieth century itself in striking, intimate detail. The Mango Tree is at its heart a novel about love, the land around us, and the bloody consequences of empire across the globe.

Robert Cabot is the author of The Isle of Khería; That Sweetest Wine: Three Novellas; The Joshua Tree; and Times Up! A Memoir of the American century. Writing is his first love. Now at 99, he has written The Mango Tree. Cabot is a fellow of the National Endowment of the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Ucross Foundation.He is a veteran of many campaigns of World War II in North Africa and Europe. He received degrees Harvard College and Yale Law School, served for ten years in the Marshall Plan and foreign aid programs in Italy, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Washington, D.C., and resigned from the foreign service in protest over U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. He has since worked with international communities, the citizen diplomacy movement, and environmental and social change projects. He lived for many years in Italy and Greece, returning to the U.S. in a solo transatlantic sail with his thirty-foot sloop in 1976. Cabot lives on Whidbey Island, Washington and in a mountain town in south-eastern Arizona with his wife Penny. Between them they have six children and many grandchildren.