The Garden - by Nick Newman (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A darkly beautiful, eerie, hypnotic novel about two elderly sisters living alone at the edge of the world.

In a place and time unknown, two elderly sisters live in a walled garden, secluded from the outside world. Evelyn and Lily have only ever known each other. What was before the garden, they have forgotten; what lies beyond it, they do not know. Each day is spent in languid service to their home: tending the bees, planting the crops, and dutifully following the instructions of the almanac written by their mother.

When a nameless boy is found hiding in the boarded house at the center of their isolated grounds, their once-solitary lives are irrevocably disrupted. Who is he? Where did he come from? And most importantly, what does he want?

As suspicions gather and allegiances falter, Evelyn and Lily are forced to confront the dark truths about themselves, the garden, and the world as they've known it.

Review Quotes

"This strangely satisfying speculative tale pulls you in quickly and leaves your head spinning." --USA Today

"A fairy tale which gets you by the throat and doesn't let go. The Garden is both a horror story and a meditation on love at the end of the world. It's a testament to Newman's extraordinary gifts that its creeping dread never overwhelms its tenderness. The cool restraint of the writing only compounds its devastating power." --Emerald Fennell, director of Promising Young Woman and Saltburn

"Part fable, part literary thriller, wholly unmoored from genre convention, The Garden may be the elusive inheritor to the weirdness of Susanna Clarke's Piranesi." --Vulture

"The Garden by Nick Newman reminds us that the true meaning of postapocalyptic fiction isn't about how the world ends, but how we live after." --The Washington Post

"Like [Cormac] McCarthy in The Road, Newman doesn't seem much interested in the causes or details of the apocalypse. . . as with the exploration of vulnerable and often quite affecting characters [as] they try to negotiate strategies of survival between a dark past and a diminished future." --Locus Magazine

"This climate-change horror story, reminiscent of John Wyndham, combines a bleak message and often brutal action with absolutely exquisite writing." --Daily Mail

"Gripping yet emotionally suffocating . . . [A] stiflingly beautiful blend of the personal apocalypse of Paul Tremblay's The Cabin at the End of the World with the mysterious introspection of Susan Fletcher's The Night in Question." --Library Journal (starred review)

"The Garden is a tender, gentle novel about the bond between two sisters, but is it also . . . a well-crafted gothic story about isolation, catastrophe and fear, with a constant eerie undertone that permeates much of the natural beauty of the garden, as well as the language of the novel." --Reactor Magazine

"If Emily Bronte had written On the Beach, it might have read something like this . . . I found myself haunted by this dark fable and impressed with the balance between archetype and story." --Crime Reads

"Just when you think you understand what has happened or will, another part of the picture blooms, rather like figuring out the identity of a flower you didn't realize you planted. The process is spellbinding." --Minnesota Star Tribune

"The Garden is a gorgeous tragedy of a book, highlighting the fear of loneliness and the toll self-sufficiency can take on a family that has no other choice." --Booklist

"Eerie, slow-burn . . . Part dystopian fantasy, part horror, this book is perfect for fans of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle." --Reader's Digest

"An enigmatic fable . . . This eerie, thought-provoking novel combines sisterly love and end-of-the-world horrors in an unforgettable pairing." --Shelf Awareness

"[A] chilling speculative fable. . . Newman impresses with his atmospheric prose and sharp exploration of obedience and isolation. This will haunt readers long after they've turned the final page." --Publishers Weekly

"Evelyn and Lily are well drawn as characters while the world around them is blurry and hard to see. . .The late film director David Lynch often compared life to a dream in his works, a dream which fables can help us see more clearly. Beyond our daily structures, personal and social, our memories and fantasies shape the earth of our waking life. As [The] Garden progresses, the brittle structures of ritual and time break up in ways both healthy and otherwise. The movement of life becomes a spiral, returning to the same situations from a higher vantage point. The personal soul, or the observing faculty, is the only constant." --Chicago Review of Books

"Hypnotic and compelling. . . [A] richly compelling novel with complex characters that is about love and survival. It is wonderful but also tragic at times but the ending is gorgeous." --The Nameless Zine

"It is an examination of human nature, a tale of survival, a peek into family dynamics through what often seems a dusty window." --Rated Reads

"A gothic novel of weird sisters in the vein of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Nick Newman's alluring debut twists and slithers into its own mysterious, compulsively readable shape. I loved it!" --Mason Coile, author of William

"I was enchanted by this spooky, dreamy novel. Expansive and claustrophobic in equal measure, The Garden is an eerie testament to the power of narrative to shape our reality--and the lengths we'll go to in order to protect what we believe." --Sara Sligar, author of Vantage Point

"Nick Newman has spun the most haunting, gripping type of apocalyptic story: one that focuses on the fragile bonds of family and the dance between trust and survival. With shades of Shirley Jackson and Susanna Clarke, The Garden is a shapeshifting fable that will stay with you long after you leave it behind." --Sara Flannery Murphy, author of The Wonder State

"Nick Newman's The Garden is a dreamy, evocative novel that reads like a grown-up fairytale." --Araminta Hall, author of One of the Good Guys

"The Garden is a seductive modern fairytale that glitters with menace and mystery. Newman writes beautifully about isolation, confinement and contagious fear, while tending a plot that is as tangled and twisty as Evelyn and Lily's beloved wilderness. This is a gorgeously imagined novel about growth, retreat and the sacrifices we make to protect our beliefs--and the people we love. --Emma Stonex, author of The Lamplighters

About the Author

Nick Newman is the adult pen-name of Nicholas Bowling, author of several children's novels including Witchborn and In the Shadow of Heroes, which was shortlisted for the Costa Children's Book Award. He works as a bookseller at Daunt Books in London.