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My Soul, A Shining Tree by Jamila Gavin

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ACHUKA Book of the Day 11 Nov 2025

Waterstones
Bookshop

“… cannot recommend it highly enough!” BfK 5-star review

Jamila Gavin is the author of some of the best children’s books of our era, notably the Suriya trilogy—The Wheel of Suriya, The Eye of the Horse, and The Track of the Wind— published in the 1990s, and followed by Coram Boy in 2000. Here she is a quarter of a century later, and now in her early eighties, showing that she can still produce fiction that towers above the rest.

See also:
Never Forget You [ACHUKA Book of the Day 11 Jun 2022] 

Based on the true story of Indian WWI gunner and recipient of the Victoria Cross, Khudadad Khan.

The story is told from four perspectives: Lotte, a Belgian farmgirl whose village is the flashpoint for a battle; Ernst, a German teenage cavalry soldier whose grandiose dreams of war lie in tatters; Khudadad Khan, the gunner fighting with the British Army; and a wild walnut tree.

When Lotte’s farm is destroyed in the fighting, she and her sister flee with their young neighbour Michael, to take refuge beneath the walnut tree on the ridge — a ridge currently being defended from the encroaching Germans by Indian gunner Khudadad Khan. There, they are joined by traumatised German soldier Ernst, whose horse lies lost in the trenches of the battle raging below. As their perspectives converge, their shared humanity emerges as a light in the darkness of war, safe beneath the branches of the walnut tree that shelters them all.