The Garden

This climate-change horror story, reminiscent of John Wyndham, combines a bleak message and often brutal action with absolutely exquisite writing * Daily Mail *A fairy tale which gets you by the throat and doesn’t let go. The Garden is both a horror story and a meditation on love at the end of the world. It’s a testament to Newman’s extraordinary gifts that its creeping dread never overwhelms its tenderness. The cool restraint of the writing only compounds its devastating power. * Emerald Fennell *The Garden is a seductive modern fairytale that glitters with menace and mystery. Newman writes beautifully about isolation, confinement and contagious fear, while tending a plot that is as tangled and twisty as Evelyn and Lily’s beloved wilderness. This is a gorgeously imagined novel about growth, retreat and the sacrifices we make to protect our beliefs - and the people we love. * Emma Stonex, author of THE LAMPIGHTERS *I was enchanted by this spooky, dreamy novel. Expansive and claustrophobic in equal measure, The Garden is an eerie testament to the power of narrative to shape our reality — and the lengths we’ll go to in order to protect what we believe. * Sara Sligar, author of Take Me Apart *[An] intriguing mix of psychological mystery and dystopian gothic. * Guardian *‘A dreamy, evocative novel that reads like a grown-up fairytale. Just like the garden that Evelyn tends, this story grows in meaning with every word. It asks the big questions about what makes us who we are and who to trust. And, like the best fairytales, the answers are often as dark as they are revealing. * Araminta Hall, author of OUR KIND OF CRUELTY *A gothic novel of weird sisters in the vein of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Nick Newman’s alluring debut twists and slithers into its own mysterious, compulsively readable shape. I loved it! * Mason Coile, author of William *With shades of Shirley Jackson and Susanna Clarke, The Garden is a shapeshifting fable that will stay with you long after you leave it behind. * Sara Flannery Murphy, author of GIRL ONE *A dark, fairy tale-like novel of creeping dread * i Newspaper *Part fable, part literary thriller, wholly unmoored from genre convention, The Garden may be the elusive inheritor to the weirdness of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. * Vulture *[A] shape-shifting novel, an enigmatic fable… Newman’s gifts lie in the quiet accumulation of his novel’s unsettled atmosphere, its changeable nature… This eerie, thought-provoking novel combines sisterly love and end-of-the-world horrors in an unforgettable pair * Shelf Awareness *An uneasy and brilliantly drawn folie à deux … like Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived In The Castle * SFX *This strangely satisfying speculative tale pulls you in quickly and leaves your head spinning. * USA Today *The Garden by Nick Newman reminds us that the true meaning of postapocalyptic fiction isn’t about how the world ends, but how we live after. * Washington Post *Gripping yet emotionally suffocating … [A] stiflingly beautiful blend of the personal apocalypse of Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World with the mysterious introspection of Susan Fletcher’s The Night in Question. * Library Journal (starred review) *The Garden is a gorgeous tragedy of a book, highlighting the fear of loneliness and the toll self-sufficiency can take on a family that has no other choice. * Booklist *[The Garden] drew me in with its intimate, slow-burn focus on two elderly sisters… What haunted me afterwards was the implicit question this climate fiction fable asks: Is it better to focus on the daily duties of life or on its beauties? On survival or on meaning? And can you have one without the other? * NPR *

Nick Newman is the pseudonym of critically acclaimed children’s author Nicholas Bowling. He has written four novels for young readers including In the Shadow of Heroes (shortlisted for the Costa Children’s Book Award) and The Undying of Obedience Wellrest (Financial Times Best YA Books of 2023, Guardian Children’s Roundup December 2023). He works as a bookseller at Daunt Books.

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