Gardener

Artist, Hassie Day, and her sister, Margot, buy a rambling, 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, out of place in the village, to help Hassie in the garden.

As Hassie works in the garden alongside Murat, she begins to ruminate on her past life, her hostile mother, her diffident father, and the sibling rivalry that tainted her childhood. Most of all, she begins to analyse the love affair that ended leaving her with painful, unanswered questions.

In Murat's peaceful company, she discovers resemblances between her plight and his and as she works the garden, and walks in the mysterious ancient nearby wood, she begins to explore the history of the house, and its former lands, and old hurts fade as she experiences the healing power of nature and learns of other, hidden worlds.

In her mesmerising new book 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