Lost Garden - Softcover

Humphreys, Helen

3.82

2,662 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1554684749 ISBN 13: 9781554684748

Publisher: Phyllis Bruce Books Perennial, 2009

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In spring 1941, when London is under attack, Gwen Davis escapes the city for Devon, where she will instruct young girls in growing crops for the Home Front. There, she 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 but free spirit whose fianc� is missing in action. Through them, Gwen comes to understand the unbelievable joy and the unbearable risks of love. Called “exquisite” by The New York Times, this beautifully nuanced novel received rave reviews around the world.

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About the Author:

HELEN HUMPHREYS is an acclaimed and award-winning author of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Her work includes the novel > Machine Without Horses, The Evening Chorus > Coventry an > Afterimage > and her non-fiction include > The Ghost Orchard an > The Frozen Thames, as well as the memoir Nocturne. She has won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Toronto Book Award, and she has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Trillium Book Prize, the Lambda Literary Award and CBC Radio’s Canada Reads. The recipient of the Harbourfront Festival Prize for literary excellence, Helen Humphreys lives in Kingston, Ontario.

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.
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