The Garden by Nick Newman

313 pages G.P. Putnam’s Sons publisher Pub Date Feb 18 2025

ABOUT THE BOOK

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.

MY THOUGHTS

I enjoy trying new authors. The book wasn’t anything like I expected it to be. I guess I was expecting something along the lines of The Secret Garden but not even close.

I expected two charming elderly sisters living together as neither had married and they’ve never ventured outside of their garden walls. Instead, the sisters fight constantly. Taking place mostly in modern times, of what year it is we have no idea.

We also have a lot of flip flopping back and forth from this modern time to whenever the mother was alive. The mother put a lot of restrictions on the sisters, they couldn’t do many things and even in their elderly age she still has control over them with their thoughts.

The sisters spend their days taking care of bee hives, farming, cleaning and raising chickens. These are elderly women who have no help and no contact with the outside world.

No mention of anything modern like tv’s or phones. All of the sudden a ragged boy shows up and totally disrupts their world, one sister likes him the other doesn’t.

Part of the huge house is boarded up from the time the mother was living, and it still is. The mother had a huge influence on them and still does.
The whole book has a strange and unsettling vibe to it. I have many questions that were not answered in the book and I’m sure there won’t be a sequel to answer them.

I was given a complimentary copy of the book.
All opinions expressed are my own.