Alejandro Zambra affirms his postmodern credentials from line one of The Private Lives of Trees: ‘Julián lulls the little girl to sleep with “The Private Lives of Trees”, a series of stories he makes up to tell her at bedtime.’ Julián is Daniela’s stepfather, a professor of literature at four of Santiago’s universities and a writer on Sundays. Like Julio in Zambra’s 1997 book Bonsai (also recently published in English by Fitzcarraldo), he is working on a novel about ‘a young man tending his bonsai’ (we also learn that, but for a bureaucratic misspelling, Julián would have been named Julio). The oral ‘The Private Lives of Trees’, which stars a poplar and a baobab, unfolds only on nights when Daniela’s mother, Verónica, is out at her drawing class.

Julián says at one point that he ‘would greatly enjoy a half-cocked book full of red herrings’, and The Private Lives of Trees is, in a way, exactly that. But the novel’s metatextual games feel slightly dated and are helped neither by ill-advised mentions of living writers – Jeanette