Here are 7 books that The Garden fans have personally recommended if you like
The Garden.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I adored this whipsmart novel about Sylvie Swift, a bold and brilliant young woman who, in 1862, lights out for Nashville, Tennessee, where she is immediately recruited to work as a spy for the chief of the Union Army's Secret Service while also chasing down a mysterious manuscript that may or may not be a version of Aristophanes' Lysistrata. Not only that -- she also becomes absorbed in the threatened world of the city's prostitutes, who offer her company and shelter, and who really were threatened with exile by Nashville's government during the Civil War. Such a rich and complex story would be impossible to tell in the hands of a lesser storyteller, but Fawkes handles the multiplying characters and storylines with admirable ease.
An epic novel about Civil War-era Nashville's "public women," an age-old secret society, and the earth-shaking power of the female
"A beautiful spinning knife of a story that whirls back through the 1800s, the 1500s, the 4th century BC, and the age of myth to slice out an image of the pain and the power that women have inherited from antiquity." --Kevin Brockmeier, O. Henry Prize-winning author of The Ghost Variations
In 1862, after a tragedy at home, twenty-two-year-old Sylvie Swift parts ways with her twin brother to trace the origins of an enigmatic playscript that's landed on their doorstep.…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
This marvelous novel took me on an incredible journey to a southern Italian village full of secrets. Set in 1960, the story revolves around a young American woman struggling to leave a bad marriage, who comes to the village to set up a school and is immediately embroiled in a mysterious death for which everyone seems to have their own explanation. The austere Calabrian setting is gorgeously evoked, as is the local language -- a form of Byzantine Greek preserved over centuries due to the village's isolation -- and simple yet mouthwatering cuisine. While the narrator learns quite a bit through her efforts to solve the mystery comes to see her personal choices in a different light, it's the villagers who linger in memory. A perfect book for the person in your life who dreams of escaping to a small Italian town -- and really, who doesn't?
One unidentified skeleton. Three missing men. A village full of secrets. The best-selling author of The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna brings us a sparkling—by turns funny and moving—novel about a young American woman turned amateur detective in a small village in Southern Italy (“Terrific” –Boston Globe).
Calabria, 1960. Francesca Loftfield, a twenty-seven-year-old, starry-eyed American, arrives in the isolated mountain village of Santa Chionia tasked with opening a nursery school. There is no road, no doctor, no running water or electricity. And thanks to a recent flood that swept away the post office, there’s no mail, either.
Niall Williams's book is balm for an ailing soul and a gift to readers. The title might suggest a saccharine, feel-good novel, but it is not. Christie, the book's big-hearted catalyzing character utters the title phrase precisely when he is thwarted in love, indicating that happiness is not a state but a state of mind. When tragedy arrives at the end, Christie, with difficulty, is still able to find the fullness of life.
But the narrator, 16-year-old No, is otherwise the main character of the book. From the perspective of sixty years hence, Noel recounts the life-changing events of 1960, when the rains suddenly stopped, spring felt like summer, and both Christie and electrification came to the western Irish village of Faha. The story is told recursively, in what I read as the great Irish oral storytelling tradition. Don't be put off by the slow start. The plot takes hold…
Shortlisted for Best Novel in the Irish Book Awards
Longlisted for the 2020 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
From the acclaimed author of Man Booker-longlisted History of the Rain
'Lyrical, tender and sumptuously perceptive' Sunday Times
'A love letter to the sleepy, unhurried and delightfully odd Ireland that is all but gone' Irish Independent
After dropping out of the seminary, seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe finds himself back in Faha, a small Irish parish where nothing ever changes, including the ever-falling rain.
But one morning the rain stops and news reaches the parish - the electricity is finally arriving. With it…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
In The Summer Book Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summer—its sunlight and storms—into twenty-two crystalline vignettes. This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia’s grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland. The grandmother is unsentimental and wise, if a little cranky; Sophia is impetuous and volatile, but she tends to her grandmother with the care of a new parent. Together they amble over coastline and forest in easy companionship, build boats from bark, create a miniature…
I’m a poet more than anything else, and perhaps that is why I'm drawn to books with well-developed landscape and subterranean lines of thought more than plot or human characters. The natural world and the magical universe are intertwined in my writing as a way to convey the importance of our place, or responsibility in the world. I'm always aware of how much work an author has done to know his landscape. When I lived overseas in Iran, I spent the hot summer days reading through my mother’s library. She had been an English teacher and so I had available all of the classics which I read–often at an earlier age than I should have.
Evie Wyld writes atmospheric and eerie stories that always have an edge, a threat of danger about them, and this wonderful book is almost gothic in its atmosphere of place. The rock itself actually exists, I’m not sure if the house in question does, but the rock and the house and the remote Scottish location bind us into a feeling of constant danger like no single character ever could. The story unfolds in a series of tales told across time periods, back and forth (a tricky format to pull off, but Wyld does it brilliantly). The central character is the great old house, in some disrepair, and how it has been occupied over time by women who have been, to one degree or another imprisoned by their circumstances. I don’t want to spoil the story, but I guarantee that from the first few pages you will be drawn into the…
The Bass Rock has for centuries watched over the lives that pass under its shadow on the Scottish mainland. And across the centuries the fates of three women are linked: to this place, to each other.
In the early 1700s, Sarah, accused of being a witch, flees for her life.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, Ruth navigates a new house, a new husband and the strange waters of the local community.
Six decades later, the house stands empty. Viv, mourning the death of her father, catalogues Ruth's belongings and discovers her…
I am the child of Holocaust survivors who chose not to talk about it. The effects were clear and stark – my mother crying out with nightmares, my father doing everything in his power not to be noticed by authorities – but I was not allowed to know their sources. Though my lottery number was 76, I missed going to Vietnam by a year as the draft ended; I watched so many of my peers come back either damaged or at least profoundly changed. I never wish I experienced war in all its hellaciousness, but from early adolescence, I have wondered how I would have acted.
Mason is a beautiful writer. It felt like each sentence was deliberated over before its final form was inscribed. But I think I connected with the book because, like the main character, I was a physician. I never had to confront whether what I learned in the lecture hall and anatomy lab was useless or meaningless, and therefore, I never had to question everything.
That’s what Lucius must do, and it gave me the opportunity to approach such questions within my own life. Are my medical gods real, worthy, or false because they can only exist in the most advantageous circumstances? What can we believe in when circumstances like war strip it down to the core?
The epic story of war and medicine from the award-winning author of The Piano Tuner is "a dream of a novel...part mystery, part war story, part romance" (Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See).
Vienna, 1914. Lucius is a twenty-two-year-old medical student when World War I explodes across Europe. Enraptured by romantic tales of battlefield surgery, he enlists, expecting a position at a well-organized field hospital. But when he arrives, at a commandeered church tucked away high in a remote valley of the Carpathian Mountains, he finds a freezing outpost ravaged by typhus. The other doctors have…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I’m a poet more than anything else, and perhaps that is why I'm drawn to books with well-developed landscape and subterranean lines of thought more than plot or human characters. The natural world and the magical universe are intertwined in my writing as a way to convey the importance of our place, or responsibility in the world. I'm always aware of how much work an author has done to know his landscape. When I lived overseas in Iran, I spent the hot summer days reading through my mother’s library. She had been an English teacher and so I had available all of the classics which I read–often at an earlier age than I should have.
Set in the 19th century New England social landscape of transcendentalist educational trends, this is an important book about women, misogyny, education, and ‘western’ medicine. The landscape here is a farmhouse outside a New England village where the patriarch social philosopher and teacher has started a school for girls following the death of his wife. His grown daughter is his helper, and you see where I’m going with this…also his prisoner. She is vulnerable by her sensitive nature and by her lack of worldly education. When other girls come to board at the new school and other teachers, men, arrive to practice the educational theories they have developed in a fervor of advancing just how women’s education should evolve, the young women respond variously to these new influences. The remote landscape, again, keeps them from freedoms that might improve their awareness. There are also magical trees, birds, and a…
'A modern scream of female outrage. A masterpiece' ELIZABETH GILBERT
'Astoundingly original . . . belongs on the shelf with your Margaret Atwood' NEW YORK TIMES
Haunting, intense and irresistible, The Illness Lesson is an extraordinary debut about women's minds and bodies, and the time-honoured tradition of doubting both.
In 1871, at an elite new school designed to shape the minds of young women, the inscrutable and defiant Eliza Bell has been overwhelmed by an inexplicable illness.
Before long, the other girls start to succumb to its peculiar symptoms - rashes, tics, night wanderings and fits.
