From the gates of Paradise to the end of time, The One and Only Tree offers an extraordinary quest — a magical, millennia-spanning adventure built upon the most sacred object in the history of Christendom.

From the bazaars of Jerusalem in the last years of the nineteenth century to the cloisters of Poitiers more than a thousand years earlier, through seven millennia of real and imagined time, this is the forgotten and forbidden legend of the True Cross — the story of the cross on which Christ was crucified. A legend so ancient, so vast and so wondrous that it reaches back to the very beginning of the world, and forward to the very end of time.

This is the story of a sacred tree. Of its miraculous journey in the company of Noah, Moses, David and King Solomon. Of how one object, shaped by God at the dawn of Creation, was destined to become the instrument of mankind's salvation. It is a story of that story too: of scribes, mad monks, chroniclers, meistersingers, painters and printers from Galway to the Land of the Berbers. Of how, for centuries, they lovingly reworked the foundation myth that has never been bettered for explaining Christianity.

Follow the great east-west routes forged by crusaders, pilgrims and storytellers. Walk in the footsteps of Bulgarian heretics in their exile. Share a hookah with a Maronite Christian through a long afternoon's storytelling. Look over the shoulder of Agnolo Gaddi as he dazzles fourteenth-century Florence with the Queen of Sheba's sibylline beauty. Try to glimpse what Dürer's Eve — enigmatic, knowing, dangerous — has hidden behind her back.

Listen for the haunting echo of a Kyrie Eleison sung for courage in the double caves beneath Hebron. Read what Ernoul, squire of Balian, wrote at the Fall of Jerusalem, and discover how Columbus' son struggled to summarise the ineffable. Marvel at how Solomon's hunters could shelter from the storm in Adam's very skull, and watch in dismay as Shakespeare's father erases the legendary past from the walls of his own church. The One and Only Tree traces the twists and turns of a tale that illuminates the medieval imagination like no other.

The One and Only Tree is as much about creativity as about belief. It is about our powers of invention and the well-springs of the narrative impulse, the urge to tell a story that encompasses all the world and all its hopes, a story that offers a key to a thousand years of humanity’s artistic endeavour.

Absurd and magical, familiar and alien, here are adventures that might have been dreamed by Borges or le Guin, that confound our sense of what to expect from Bible stories and ancient literature. ‘O sovereign, vertuous, precious of all trees’ – cried Milton’s Eve: the happy tree, the wondrous tree, the one and only noble tree.