Description

The new novel from Salley Vickers, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Librarian and Grandmothers

Artist, Hassie Days, and her sister, Margot, buy a run down Jacobean house in Hope Wenlock on the Welsh Marches. While Margot continues her London life in high finance, Hassie is left alone to work the large, long-neglected garden. She is befriended by eccentric, sharp-tongued, Miss Foot, who recommends, Murat, an Albanian migrant, made to feel out of place among the locals, to help Hassie in the garden.

As she works the garden in Murat’s peaceful company, Hassie ruminates on her past life: the sibling rivalry that tainted her childhood and the love affair that left her with painful, unanswered questions.

But as she begins to explore the history of the house and the mysterious nearby wood, old hurts begin to fade as she experiences the healing power of nature and discovers other worlds.

In her haunting new novel, Salley Vickers, the bestselling author of The Librarian and The Cleaner of Chartres, writes with the profound psychological insight and sense of the numinous power of place that is the hallmark of all her novels.

‘Salley Vickers sees with a clear eye and writes with a light hand. She’s a presence worth cherishing’ Philip Pullman

‘The Gardener is a novel of regrowth & regeneration, of sisters overcoming a toxic parental legacy & of the healing power of seed packets’ Patrick Gale

‘Steeped in a sense of the redemptive power of place, Sally Vickers’s 11th novel is a paean to green-fingered regeneration that is both rigorous and charming’ Observer

‘Profoundly moving, healing and wise, this is the perfect antidote to our urban anxiety’ Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat

Publisher Review

Salley Vickers sees with a clear eye and writes with a light hand. She's a presence worth cherishing -- Philip Pullman The Gardener is a novel of regrowth & regeneration, of sisters overcoming a toxic parental legacy & of the healing power of seed packets -- Patrick Gale Steeped in a sense of the redemptive power of place, Sally Vickers's 11th novel is a paean to green-fingered regeneration that is both rigorous and charming * Observer * Vickers writes of relationships with undaunted clarity -- Adam Phillips No one can dig down into the shrouded recesses of the human heart quite as forensically as Vickers * Sunday Times * An escapist, involving novel about relationships and two siblings coming to terms with their childhood and each other * Saga * With its sensitively drawn characters, this is a quiet and intelligent hymn to the restorative power of nature. Delightful * Mail on Sunday * The bestselling author of Miss Garnet's Angel and The Librarian, Vickers has been a Jungian therapist and her novels have always featured personal growth and transformation. This is no exception, as Hassie weathers bereavement, a break-up and midlife despair, but finds a sense of new beginnings and a feeling for the power of place. It also has some sharp social observation about the reality of moving out to the sticks in post-Brexit Britain * Sunday Times * Salley Vickers is skilled at transforming the everyday into something haunting. This tale of a woman's search for inner peace is no exception * Daily Express *