At the Bottom of the Garden

Keep out of the hands of children. An adult fairytale with a wicked aunt, gifted children and a vengeful housekeeper.


Clara Woods is a killer – and perfectly fine with it, too. No harm, no foul if she takes a couple of lives to make her own existence a little bit better. At the bottom of the garden is a flowerbed, long overgrown, where her late husband rests in peace – or so she always thought. Until the girls arrived.


Lily and Violet are her adolescent nieces, recently orphaned and in urgent need of care. Raising teenagers is certainly not what Clara had envisioned for herself, but her funds are drying up and the girls come with a neat sum attached.


There is only one problem: both girls are untrained witches, with newly heightened powers due to inheriting their mother's power when she died. Lily can literally see how people are feeling. And young Violet... well. Violet can see the dead man at the bottom of the garden. She can see them all, in fact… and call them back to existence.


Soon Clara is surrounded by pesky apparitions, and at war with the gifted girls in her care. The latter have become a liability – and know far more than they should.

'All the elegance and all the venom, like one of E. Nesbit's supernatural stories served with a side of arsenic.' Grady Hendrix, New York Times bestselling author of How to Sell a Haunted House

'A propulsive novel with gorgeous prose and incredible characters you won't soon forget.' Gwendolyn Kiste, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Reluctant Immortals and The Haunting of Velkwood

'One gorgeously morbid gothic novel that's just as gleeful as it is gashlycrumb.' Clay McLeod Chapman, author of What Kind of Mother and Ghost Eaters

'Theatrical and deliciously dark, this book is pure magic' A.J. West, author of The Spirit Engineer

'Bruce’s unique cast of characters is both charming and terrifying. A young synesthetic musician, an even younger sensitive, a murderous aunt, and a houseful of furious ghosts – it’s all here! A delightful read.' Louisa Morgan, author of A Secret History of Witches

'A murderess becomes the guardian of two very unusual girls in this mesmerizing gothic novel from acclaimed author Camilla Bruce.' Nerd Daily 

'At the Bottom of the Garden delivers everything I've come to expect from Bruce's writing. The prose is beautiful, its characters are brilliant, and it smartly uses fairy tale and gothic tropes to explore the lives of unusual women. And for a novel that's so much about grief and loss, it might just be her most fun story yet. Long may her reign as the Queen of literary feminist horror continue.' Jonathan Thornton for The Fantasy Hive

'The exciting, ultimately emotional final act of this energetic and satisfying novel will scratch the itch of readers looking for an icy read that's a little bit creepy, a little bit funny, and just predictable enough to be comforting-if you like your comfort served with axe murders, poison, and ectoplasmic tadpoles.' Wade Newhouse for LA Review of Books

Camilla Bruce was born in central Norway and grew up in an old forest, next to an Iron Age burial mound. She has a master's degree in comparative literature, and has co-run a small press that published dark fairy tales. Camilla currently lives in Trondheim with her son and cat.

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