When thirteen-year-old Evie from the affluent suburbs meets fourteen-year-old streetwise Adrian from the urban fringe, their brief friendship challenges everything they know about class and belonging. But when circumstance tears them apart, and they reconnect forty years later through a dating site, both must confront time, guilt, and the lives that kept them apart to discover if love can still begin again.

SYNOPSIS:

In the sun-bleached summer of 1985, Evie, a curious and sheltered 13-year-old from the affluent suburbs, is taken out of her comfort zone when she’s sent to stay with relatives on the city’s rougher outskirts. There she meets Adrian, a streetwise and guarded 14-year-old who’s grown up fast in the shadow of hardship and neglect.

Despite their vast differences class, culture, and worldview the two form a fragile but meaningful friendship beneath the old mulberry tree in a derelict park. For one fleeting season, they share laughter, fears, and dreams. But the divide between their worlds proves too great, and circumstances tear them apart.

Decades pass. Now in their fifties, both have lived full but unfulfilled lives. Evie, a recently divorced art teacher, and Adrian, a blue-collar worker who’s never truly opened his heart, stumble upon each other through a dating site. They begin chatting, unaware of their shared history. As their connection deepens, pieces of the past fall into place until the astonishing realisation dawns: they were once the children under the mulberry tree.

Under the Mulberry Tree is a moving, time-spanning story about the innocence of youth, the walls society builds between us, and the second chances that love sometimes offers when we least expect it.