The Mango Tree (Hardcover)

Winner: 2013 Independent Publisher Award (IPPY) Silver Medal for Literary Fiction

The Isle of Kheria might be read as an elegy to the 20th century, or as a paean to the confusions of youth and its aftermath. But, more directly, this novel is the portrayal of a conflicted and unresolved forty-year friendship between two men deeply wounded by the circumstances of their lives. Still grief-stricken over his wife's recent death, Joel Brewster leaves his Canadian farm when he learns of the death of his best friend, Aidan Allard. In what may have been suicide, Aidan drowned while swimming off the coast of Khería, an island in the Agean. Filled with dread, Joel journeys to Kheria, seeking answers to Aidan's death, while confronting longstanding feelings of guilt. The lives of these men make for compelling stories, spanning much of the twentieth century and beginning with childhoods in England and New England; then frontline soldiering in World War II; exile to Greece at the time of its civil war; and with subsequent rebellion and searching for alternatives in Italy, England, the US and Canada; as well as throughout their attempts at love with women, and with each other. Far off Kheria's rocky coast, looming over all, is the foreboding presence of Khímaera, an mythic islet, an illusory goal. The Isle of Khería is written in a haunting, poetic prose, a unique style acclaimed in Cabot's earlier novels, The Joshua Tree and That Sweetest Wine.

A veteran of many of the campaigns of World War II, Robert Cabot received degrees from Harvard College and Yale Law School, served for some time in several capacities in the Executive Offi ce of the President in the Truman administrations, and then for ten years in the Marshall Plan and foreign aid programs in Italy, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Washington, D.C. He resigned from government service in protest over U.S. policy. Cabot moved to Italy, then to Greece, years later returning to the U.S. in a solo transatlantic sail with his thirty-foot sloop. He settled in Canada and later in Washington State. During these years, he wrote a series of articles decrying American policies in the Cold War, and for several years was active in citizen diplomacy in the Soviet Union and Afghanistan. He was a founder of the Turtle Island Fund promoting many conservation land trusts including an agricultural/educational community in British Columbia where he lived for five years; the Threshold Foundation helping social change projects around the world; a Waldorf School near Seattle; and, with his wife Penny, the Seattle Peoples Fund to help struggling ethnic communities in the Puget Sound Area. Writing, however, is his first love. He has written several novels, including: The Joshua Tree, Atheneum, 1970, republished several times, most recently by Bloomsbury in 2012; That Sweetest Wine, McPherson & Co., 1999, finalist for an Independent Publishers Award; and The Isle of Kheria, McPherson & Co., 2012. Cabot is a Fellow of the McDowell Colony, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Ucross Foundatgion.