Lisboa, 1987
Luísa Sobral, one of the most recognized singer-songwriters of the new generation of Portuguese music, makes her debut in fiction with the novel Nem Todas as Árvores Morrem de Pé (Leya, 2025). Previously, she had already ventured into children’s literature with the stories Quando a Porta Fica Aberta (2022) and O Peso das Palavras (2024). Trained at the Berklee College of Music, Sobral has released several albums and gained international recognition as the composer of Amar pelos dois, the winning song of the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest. With this new work, acclaimed in Portugal by critics and readers alike, she carves out her own path in fiction.
Bibliography
A sweeping debut novel that intertwines the lives of two women across a divided Germany, revealing the hidden costs of love, history, and the walls—both real and invisible— that shape us.
Spanning the darkest decades of twentieth-century Germany, Not All Trees Die Standing is a tale of love, loss, and survival on both sides of the Berlin Wall.
Read moreNovel
A sweeping debut novel that intertwines the lives of two women across a divided Germany, revealing the hidden costs of love, history, and the walls—both real and invisible— that shape us.
Spanning the darkest decades of twentieth-century Germany, Not All Trees Die Standing is a tale of love, loss, and survival on both sides of the Berlin Wall.
Emmi comes of age in the shadow of Hitler’s rise to power. After losing her father to the war, she shoulders the burden of work from a young age—until a chance meeting with Markus, a man from East Berlin, offers her a glimpse of love and hope. Against her mother’s wishes but with her sister’s blessing, Emmi follows him across the border into the GDR. At first, happiness seems within reach. But when the Wall goes up, the price of loyalty and the weight of secrets begin to tear her world apart.
Years later, M. is born into a divided nation, the model child of socialism. Raised by a plant-loving nanny and devoted to a father she adores, M. grows up sheltered from the West, cocooned in a carefully crafted illusion. Until a shocking revelation cracks the façade—and she discovers that it isn’t only the Wall that hides another side.
With a bold structure and unforgettable characters, Luísa Sobral’s debut novel illuminates the intimate costs of history, asking what it means to love, to endure, and to see beyond the walls that shape us.
“Luísa Sobral crafts a complex work, where various “songs” intertwine, including first-person narrative, diary fragments, aphorisms, and short pieces resembling poems, together with the ever-present herbarium, whose plants, beyond accompanying the story, hold a healing power for the many afflictions suffered by the protagonists.” Público