The Lost Garden - Hardcover

Helen Humphreys

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 074756261X ISBN 13: 9780747562610

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2003

Synopsis

It's Spring 1941 and London is being destroyed by the Blitz. Gwen Davis, a young horticulturalist, leaves the city for the Devon countryside. In charge of a troop of landgirls, her job is to rebuild the grounds of a neglected estate to grow food for the home front. The beautiful manor is far removed from the fighting but Gwen has her own battles - as she struggles with her shyness and fear of intimacy to create a community among her girls. Then Gwen meets two people who will change her life forever. Raley, a Canadian officer awaiting posting to the front with his men and Jane, a frail, free spirit whose fiance is missing in action. Through them, and the beautiful 'lost' garden that she stumbles upon, she finds a flowering of a different sort - her own profound capacity for love, even in the face of pain. As the harsh realities of war start to intrude, Gwen finds herself swept up into a world of passion and feeling that she never imagined. Through Raley and Jane, she comes at last to understand the unbelievable joy and unbearable risks of love. THE LOST GARDEN is a triumph of storytelling, a novel so delicately wrought, so exquisite in its rendering of loss that it takes your breath - and your heart - away.

About this title

About the Author:

Helen Humphreys is the author of LEAVING EARTH and AFTERIMAGE. She is the author of four books of poetry and her work has appeared around the world in many languages. She lives in Kingston, Ontario in Canada.

From Publishers Weekly:

Evocative, if occasionally clunky, Humphreys's third novel (following Afterimage) is the story of an Englishwoman's search for her place in a world permeated by war. The narrator, 35-year-old Gwen Davis, is a horticulturist who flees bombed-out WWII London to manage a team of "land girls"-women who grow vegetables as part of the war effort-at a country estate. She struggles to manage her wayward charges, who are more interested in the Canadian soldiers billeted in the main house than in cultivating potatoes, and writes letters in her head to her idol Virginia Woolf, whose recent death has left her feeling bereft. She also tries to seduce the world-weary, hard-drinking Captain Raley, who has a secret of his own that dooms their relationship. Though her conflicts pale next to those of the soldiers waiting to be posted to battle and even those of her new friend, Jane, whose cousin is a casualty of war and whose fiance is missing in action, it is Gwen's quiet self-discovery that is at the center of the novel. Humphreys renders convincingly her first, fleeting experience of deep friendship and love. Unfortunately, the story is sometimes marred by overwrought or cloying prose, though Humphreys's language also has its moments of elegance (during the blitz, "houses become holes. Solids become spaces. Anything can disappear overnight"). Humphreys doesn't quite have the narrative energy of Pat Barker and Jane Gardam, but fans of those authors may enjoy this exploration of the impact of WWII on English life.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 074756261X
• ISBN 13: 9780747562610
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192