ABOUT THIS BOOK

Featured on NPR's Living on Earth
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“A deeply meditative book in the vein of Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass.”
—Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus

As a child in the foothills of the Himalayas, Priyanka Kumar was entranced by forest-like orchards of diverse and luscious fruit—especially apples. These biodiverse orchards seemed worlds away from the cardboard apples that lined supermarket shelves in the United States. Yet on a small patch of woods near her home in Santa Fe, Kumar discovered a wild apple tree—and the seeds of an odyssey were planted. Could the taste of a feral apple offer a doorway to the wild? In The Light Between Apple Trees, Kumar takes us on a dazzling and transformative journey to rediscover apples, unearthing a rich and complex history while illuminating how we can reimagine our relationship with nature.

Apples are popular, but in our everyday lives we rarely encounter more than a handful of varieties: of the sixteen thousand apple varieties once celebrated in America, scarcely a fifth remain accessible. Kumar reveals the richness of a hidden world, bringing readers to the vibrant forests and orchards where historic trees still survive. These mature and wild orchards offer more than just fruit: they are havens for creatures from hummingbirds to bears and a living connection to generations past. She brilliantly weaves together science and childhood memories with the apple’s storied history, from its roots in Kazakhstan to Spanish orchards in the Southwest and Thomas Jefferson’s beloved Monticello fruitery.

The Light Between Apple Trees is a lyric odyssey that will forever change how you look at an “apple a day.” Kumar shows how—if we follow untamed paths—the tang and texture of an apple can lead us back to the wild.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Priyanka Kumar is the author of Conversations with Birds, widely acclaimed as “a landmark book” that “could help people around the world rewild their hearts and souls” (Psychology Today). Kumar’s essays appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Orion, and Sierra magazine. She has been featured on CBS News Radio, Yale Climate Connections, and Oprah Daily, and her awards include an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Award, an ICJS Fellowship, a New Mexico/New Visions Governor’s Award, an Aldo Leopold residency, a Canada Council for the Arts Grant, and an Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Fellowship. She holds an MFA from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts and is an alumna of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She wrote, directed, and produced the feature documentary The Song of the Little Road, starring Martin Scorsese and Ravi Shankar, which premiered at Telluride and is in the permanent collection of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Kumar taught at the University of California Santa Cruz and the University of Southern California, and serves on the Advisory Council of the Leopold Writing Program. She completed a Climate Master certification in 2025.

REVIEWS

"Join Priyanka Kumar on a captivating exploration of wild apple trees and the people who tend them. In the Southwest, these ancient groves are threatened by drying acequias and diminishing expertise in orchards, but Kumar shows us reasons for hope in hundred-year-old trees and passionate caretakers. This is environmental writing at its best."

— Joan Strassmann, author of "Slow Birding"

"Can a book about apple trees change the world? Priyanka Kumar's visionary book transformed the way I look at biodiversity and the wild, and I feel certain it will do the same for you."— Psychology Today

"Nature writer Kumar (Conversations with Birds) explores the history and diversity of apples in this thorough mix of memoir and ecology... readers will be inspired to reconnect with nature."— Publishers Weekly

"A captivating cultural history of the heirloom apple, The Light Between Apple Trees delivers an urgent message about maintaining biodiversity during a time of ecological tumult."— Foreword Reviews

"A tour de force. This book is a joy and a profoundly serious work."— Robert Scheer, Scheer Intelligence

"Enchanted by apples, Priyanka Kumar takes the reader along on a wide-ranging exploration of the fruit. The Light Between Apple Trees is a unique book about family, the environment, cultivation, and the need for the preservation of wild places. Priyanka Kumar is one of the most interesting and enjoyable voices in contemporary natural history writing."— Mark Lynch, host of Inquiry on WICN

"The apple is not yet tamed, and neither are we. Priyanka Kumar’s The Light Between Apple Trees is rich, complex, and wonderfully wild."

— Michelle Nijhuis, author of "Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction"

"A delicious book to savor from an author who’s impeccable research and “field work” in orchards and along river trails in Northern New Mexico combine with visceral memories from her native Himalayan foothills. A journey around the world through apples, this book essentially defines what’s really happening with climate change. Climate change through the core of the apple!"— Carly Newfeld, KSFR "The Last Word"

"A deeply meditative book in the vein of Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, The Light Between Apple Trees begins with Priyanka’s relationship with these most beloved and widely cultivated of life-giving fruit trees. She then takes us along on intimate explorations of historic orchards and examines how deepening our ecological consciousness today could help restore the health of our ailing forests."

— Sy Montgomery, author of "The Soul of an Octopus"

"The transatlantic travels of the apple are also fascinating, extending from New Mexico to Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, who was a devoted grower and admirer of apples in his 8-acre 'fruitery'. The essayist and broadcaster Priyanka Kumar has just explored them in her new book, The Light Between Apple Trees."— Robin Lane Fox, Financial Times

"A book luminous with wonder and brimming with curiosity. The wild entanglements of trees and people are vividly evoked in these marvelous explorations, showing how the living world is animated and united by caretaking and mutualism."

— David George Haskell, biologist and two-time Pulitzer-finalist author of "Sounds Wild and Broken," "The Songs of Trees," and "The Forest Unseen"

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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