The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Zambra, Alejandro. The Private Lives of Trees. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023.

Alejandro Zambra's novel The Private Lives of Trees is written from the third person point of view. This third person narration is limited to the protagonist Julián's point of view. The novel spans a single night and the early hours of the following morning. Zambra toys with conventional notions of plot and form throughout in order to enact his main character's interminable circumstances and internal distress. For the sake of clarity, the following summary abides by a more traditional and linear mode of explanation.

Throughout his relationship with a woman named Karla, Julián is preoccupied with his teaching and writing endeavors. He therefore fails to notice when his girlfriend's behavior begins to change. Then one day, Karla simply stops coming home. When she infrequently returns to the apartment, she makes paltry and confusing excuses for her whereabouts. Julián is largely unfazed by her absence, however, as he fell out of love with her quite a while before. Then one day, Julián returns to the apartment after work to find a hateful message written on the wall in paint. Without seeking an explanation for Karla's anger with him, Julián packs his things and leaves.

Julián finds an ad for an apartment he visited once before. On Karla's birthday one year, he ordered a cake from a woman named Verónica. When he collected the cake, he was delighted by her apartment and the cozy familial life she seemed to have there with her daughter Daniela. Pleased by this memory and the coincidence of finding her space now empty, he signs a lease and moves in.

Throughout the months following, he begins to fantasize about Verónica. After finding her number, he starts ordering cake after cake from her. Finally she softens to Julián, and the two eventually start dating.

Julián and Verónica marry when Daniela is five years old. Although her mother and father Fernando were only married for three months, Daniela visits with Fernando every so often.

In the years since Julián and Verónica's marriage, they have made a happy life. Indeed, Julián loves his new family so much that he often forgets Daniela is not his own daughter. One night, Julián is lying in bed with Daniela telling her stories. Although Verónica should have been home from her community drawing class over an hour before, Julián tries to remain calm and to distract Daniela.

Over the course of the hours that follow, Verónica still has not resurfaced. Julián tries to locate her by calling around, but to no avail. He invents several explanations for her absence, but none of them seems right. In order to stave off despair, Julián distracts himself by watching a soccer match, smoking cigarettes, rereading his recently completed manuscript, obsessing over all of the stories he could and should have written, and drifting into memories from his childhood past.

At roughly five in the morning, Julián realizes that the future he has dreaded is on the verge of arriving: a new waking reality in which Verónica is gone. In order to alleviate the pain of this new realization, Julián invents a future life for Daniela in which her circumstances are untinged by her loss in the present.

When Daniela wakes up, Julián stages the reality he wants to give her. He pretends as if her mother did come home and has simply left for work. He then walks her to school. Before saying goodbye, he holds her hand and kisses her.