What do you think?
Rate this book
Threading the Labyrinth
American owner of a failing gallery, Toni, is unexpectedly called to England when she inherits a manor house in Hertfordshire from a mysterious lost relative.
What she really needs is something valuable to sell, so she can save her business. But, leaving the New Mexico desert behind, all she finds is a crumbling building, overgrown gardens, and a wealth of historical paperwork that needs cataloguing.
Soon she is immersed in the history of the house, and all the people who tended the gardens over the centuries: the gardens that seem to change in the twilight; the ghost of a fighter plane from World War Two; the figures she sees in the corner of her eye.
A beautiful testament to the power of memory and space, Threading the Labyrinth tells the stories of those who loved this garden across the centuries, and how those lives still touch us today.
What she really needs is something valuable to sell, so she can save her business. But, leaving the New Mexico desert behind, all she finds is a crumbling building, overgrown gardens, and a wealth of historical paperwork that needs cataloguing.
Soon she is immersed in the history of the house, and all the people who tended the gardens over the centuries: the gardens that seem to change in the twilight; the ghost of a fighter plane from World War Two; the figures she sees in the corner of her eye.
A beautiful testament to the power of memory and space, Threading the Labyrinth tells the stories of those who loved this garden across the centuries, and how those lives still touch us today.
309 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 13, 2020
19 people are currently reading
460 people want to read
About the author
Tiffani Angus
16 books23 followersTiffani Angus, PhD, is the co-author of the multi-award-finalist Spec Fic for Newbies: A Beginner's Guide to Writing Subgenres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, volumes 1 and 2, from Luna Press. She's also the author of the multi-award-finalist historical-fantasy novel Threading the Labyrinth (2020), which was re-issued in 2024 by Luna Press as an extended 2nd edition. In a former life she was a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Publishing, Course Leader for the MA Creative Writing, Co-Course Leader for the MA Publishing, and General Director of the Anglia Centre for Science Fiction & Fantasy at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK. A graduate of Clarion 2009, Viable Paradise XII (2008), and a regular attendee of the Milford Writers' Workshop UK, she's published short fiction in a variety of subgenres. When she's not working on her next stories and novels, she's freelance editing, proofreading, writing, and mentoring, and she has a regular column on the British Fantasy Society's website doing deep dives on SFF/H subgenres. She also owns the book typesetting business Book Polishers.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 38 reviews
August 4, 2020
(The following review first appeared on the fantasy-hive website)
Threading the Labyrinth is an unusual work of fantasy fiction. The simplest handle on it might be to say that it is like a grown-up development Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, a book from my own childhood about a boy who finds that when the clock strikes thirteen rather than midnight he can pass from the dull 1950s experience of an old house into its glorious heyday at the end of the Victorian era and discover new friends and adventures. But that single glib parallel does not do justice to Tiffani Angus’s novel.
The book begins in a framing story set in 2010 where Toni Hammond – a financially troubled New Mexico Art gallery owner – discovers she has inherited a near-derelict English country house and the associated gardens. On visiting her new property she stumbles into the remains of a walled garden and the book then alternates between different periods in the past and Toni’s present as she tries to understand her own links to the house and decide what she will do with it.
The past episodes are each long portions of the story, the book dotting back and forth along the four hundred year timeline of the garden’s existence. Each episode is a story in its own right told in differing points of view – some first person, some third person – and styles. But all share a common root in the walled garden – and the haunting goings-on that reach from the past into 2010 to unsettle the ruthlessly American new owner.
The Associations
In the last couple of years, I have discovered whisky and I am enjoying sampling the wide variety within that single spirit. I particularly like the rich textured flavour of my latest favourite single malt* – a recent recommendation from a couple of friends – although I don’t have quite the subtlety of taste and smell to pick out all the individual detail of “sultanas, stewed plums, waves of BBQ spices, peat smoke, sea salt and citrus sweetness” that are apparently in the palate. However, reading Threading the Labryrinth often put me in mind of a fine complex whisky as it kept triggering different associations with books and history and gardens. The threads of the story are not so much woven or even entangled as organically entwined through the strange magic of the walled garden in the grounds of an old house named “The Remains.”
Besides Tom’s Midnight Garden there is another childhood book that resonates with Threading The Labyrinth. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden highlights the fascination of a secret place and the emotional investment that grieving adults and bratty children can make in a walled garden, open to the heavens yet still an intimate private space in which to discover friendship, health and happiness.
I was also reminded of Frederick Forsyth’s The Shepherd about a ghostly guide flying beside an RAF pilot lost over the sea a few years after the Second World War. Or Audrey Niffenberger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife, who finds her past, present, and future husband flickering in and out of her own more conventionally unidirectional timeline.
When a gardener argues with an artist:
“This,” he has said, and pointed to the red and yellow and green swirls and lines made from hundreds of hothouse begonias and geraniums and pot marigolds, “is also art,”
I found myself thinking of a documentary on a young Arnold Schwarzenegger, of how his work was not so much bodybuilding, as body sculpting, devising exercises to build individual muscles into the shapes he wanted. Art comes in many forms and gardening – the sculpting of creation – is no less creative than any other.
There are shades of Poldark in the returning army veteran and the women he loved and left. Of Mary Poppins, or perhaps David Copperfield, in the eccentric aunt bequeathing her love of photography to a precocious niece – and reminding me of long ago science lessons getting students to develop their pinhole camera photographs in a miniature darkroom made out of a cardboard box. The book itself references the Cottingley Fairies – another gardens and photographs fantasy, and finally, in the way the book condenses centuries of experience into a single lived moment Threading the Labyrinth reminded me of the closing paragraphs of A.G.McDonnell’s England, Their England.
The Story
While each element of the past is a complete and satisfying story of its own, the spine that connects the myriad subplots and characters is the walled garden – a character in its own right.
As Angus observes,
Gardens are not rooms inside houses, though. You cannot fill a garden, even a small one, with your presence: it is always bigger. And Vale’s attempt fell short.
Those gifted – or cursed – with an affinity for its unstated magic are haunted by images or sounds from other times even as they try to navigate their own troubles. The garden’s past and future seduces and inhabits the gardeners as much as some of them might wish to seduce each other. Some people appear; others disappear; the same abandoned child cries in many different centuries, but grows up in only one.
Working in a garden was hypnotising.
Reading Threading the Labyrinth, like working in the garden at its heart, is a hypnotic experience, drawing you in as the layered and overlaid stories bleed into each other.
The Writing
There are many lovely descriptions of the garden that leap out of the page as though you can almost smell the scent of the flowers:
A stone mermaid, softened with green lichen.
Or:
Stamens and pistils, violently yellow with pollen.
Or:
…flowers orange and yellow, small coins of colour in a fading year.
The characters and periods are equally faithfully represented in differentiated descriptions of clothing, character, and dialogue. There are lines of that wickedly capture the tone of the particular times, such as this biting rebuke from the lord of the house to his wife with whom he has been gambling before an audience.
Her husband spoke slowly, relishing the effect his words would have. “Your purse is empty.” A few ladies gasped at the cruelty. A few others tittered at his wit. Her Ladyship’s barrenness was a well-known secret.
The Research
The wealth of knowledge and research forms the rich and fertile soil in which Tiffani Angus has planted her mysteries. The reader can find comforting reassurance in the details of gardening practice through the ages. It is also a salutary reminder of the scale of servitude that was required to maintain an English Country house. We may have seen the array of indoor servants in Downton Abbey, or Upstairs Downstairs, but Threading The Labyrinth reminds us that it took an army of gardeners to maintain these large estates, all deployed in specialised hierarchies beneath the command of a head gardener.
The account of Victorian photography was also vividly rendered. In the days of smartphones and instant selfies, we forget how laborious a process photography once was, cumbersome equipment and poses carefully held for long exposures.
It is the final past story of the amateur photographer in Victorian times that I found most fittingly brought Threading the Labyrinth into full bloom as artists and would-be photographers trade lines and thoughts like these:
To capture a moment in time and hold it forever was magic.
Photography was forever.
Art is about finding something new in the world you look at every day.
It felt to me then as though the ghostly thoughts of the author were appearing in the background of the thoughts of the characters, for Threading The Labyrinth is about the magic of capturing and experiencing many moments in time and holding them all together in a single superimposed instant.
In the same way that Einstein took the simplicity of his theory of Special Relativity forward into the all-encompassing majesty of General Relativity, Tiffani Angus’s Threading the Labyrinth takes the magic of those childhood books I already loved, and transforms it into something infinitely more complex, enthralling and fascinating.
*(Kilchoman – Loch Gorm, since you ask)
Threading the Labyrinth is an unusual work of fantasy fiction. The simplest handle on it might be to say that it is like a grown-up development Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, a book from my own childhood about a boy who finds that when the clock strikes thirteen rather than midnight he can pass from the dull 1950s experience of an old house into its glorious heyday at the end of the Victorian era and discover new friends and adventures. But that single glib parallel does not do justice to Tiffani Angus’s novel.
The book begins in a framing story set in 2010 where Toni Hammond – a financially troubled New Mexico Art gallery owner – discovers she has inherited a near-derelict English country house and the associated gardens. On visiting her new property she stumbles into the remains of a walled garden and the book then alternates between different periods in the past and Toni’s present as she tries to understand her own links to the house and decide what she will do with it.
The past episodes are each long portions of the story, the book dotting back and forth along the four hundred year timeline of the garden’s existence. Each episode is a story in its own right told in differing points of view – some first person, some third person – and styles. But all share a common root in the walled garden – and the haunting goings-on that reach from the past into 2010 to unsettle the ruthlessly American new owner.
The Associations
In the last couple of years, I have discovered whisky and I am enjoying sampling the wide variety within that single spirit. I particularly like the rich textured flavour of my latest favourite single malt* – a recent recommendation from a couple of friends – although I don’t have quite the subtlety of taste and smell to pick out all the individual detail of “sultanas, stewed plums, waves of BBQ spices, peat smoke, sea salt and citrus sweetness” that are apparently in the palate. However, reading Threading the Labryrinth often put me in mind of a fine complex whisky as it kept triggering different associations with books and history and gardens. The threads of the story are not so much woven or even entangled as organically entwined through the strange magic of the walled garden in the grounds of an old house named “The Remains.”
Besides Tom’s Midnight Garden there is another childhood book that resonates with Threading The Labyrinth. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden highlights the fascination of a secret place and the emotional investment that grieving adults and bratty children can make in a walled garden, open to the heavens yet still an intimate private space in which to discover friendship, health and happiness.
I was also reminded of Frederick Forsyth’s The Shepherd about a ghostly guide flying beside an RAF pilot lost over the sea a few years after the Second World War. Or Audrey Niffenberger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife, who finds her past, present, and future husband flickering in and out of her own more conventionally unidirectional timeline.
When a gardener argues with an artist:
“This,” he has said, and pointed to the red and yellow and green swirls and lines made from hundreds of hothouse begonias and geraniums and pot marigolds, “is also art,”
I found myself thinking of a documentary on a young Arnold Schwarzenegger, of how his work was not so much bodybuilding, as body sculpting, devising exercises to build individual muscles into the shapes he wanted. Art comes in many forms and gardening – the sculpting of creation – is no less creative than any other.
There are shades of Poldark in the returning army veteran and the women he loved and left. Of Mary Poppins, or perhaps David Copperfield, in the eccentric aunt bequeathing her love of photography to a precocious niece – and reminding me of long ago science lessons getting students to develop their pinhole camera photographs in a miniature darkroom made out of a cardboard box. The book itself references the Cottingley Fairies – another gardens and photographs fantasy, and finally, in the way the book condenses centuries of experience into a single lived moment Threading the Labyrinth reminded me of the closing paragraphs of A.G.McDonnell’s England, Their England.
The Story
While each element of the past is a complete and satisfying story of its own, the spine that connects the myriad subplots and characters is the walled garden – a character in its own right.
As Angus observes,
Gardens are not rooms inside houses, though. You cannot fill a garden, even a small one, with your presence: it is always bigger. And Vale’s attempt fell short.
Those gifted – or cursed – with an affinity for its unstated magic are haunted by images or sounds from other times even as they try to navigate their own troubles. The garden’s past and future seduces and inhabits the gardeners as much as some of them might wish to seduce each other. Some people appear; others disappear; the same abandoned child cries in many different centuries, but grows up in only one.
Working in a garden was hypnotising.
Reading Threading the Labyrinth, like working in the garden at its heart, is a hypnotic experience, drawing you in as the layered and overlaid stories bleed into each other.
The Writing
There are many lovely descriptions of the garden that leap out of the page as though you can almost smell the scent of the flowers:
A stone mermaid, softened with green lichen.
Or:
Stamens and pistils, violently yellow with pollen.
Or:
…flowers orange and yellow, small coins of colour in a fading year.
The characters and periods are equally faithfully represented in differentiated descriptions of clothing, character, and dialogue. There are lines of that wickedly capture the tone of the particular times, such as this biting rebuke from the lord of the house to his wife with whom he has been gambling before an audience.
Her husband spoke slowly, relishing the effect his words would have. “Your purse is empty.” A few ladies gasped at the cruelty. A few others tittered at his wit. Her Ladyship’s barrenness was a well-known secret.
The Research
The wealth of knowledge and research forms the rich and fertile soil in which Tiffani Angus has planted her mysteries. The reader can find comforting reassurance in the details of gardening practice through the ages. It is also a salutary reminder of the scale of servitude that was required to maintain an English Country house. We may have seen the array of indoor servants in Downton Abbey, or Upstairs Downstairs, but Threading The Labyrinth reminds us that it took an army of gardeners to maintain these large estates, all deployed in specialised hierarchies beneath the command of a head gardener.
The account of Victorian photography was also vividly rendered. In the days of smartphones and instant selfies, we forget how laborious a process photography once was, cumbersome equipment and poses carefully held for long exposures.
It is the final past story of the amateur photographer in Victorian times that I found most fittingly brought Threading the Labyrinth into full bloom as artists and would-be photographers trade lines and thoughts like these:
To capture a moment in time and hold it forever was magic.
Photography was forever.
Art is about finding something new in the world you look at every day.
It felt to me then as though the ghostly thoughts of the author were appearing in the background of the thoughts of the characters, for Threading The Labyrinth is about the magic of capturing and experiencing many moments in time and holding them all together in a single superimposed instant.
In the same way that Einstein took the simplicity of his theory of Special Relativity forward into the all-encompassing majesty of General Relativity, Tiffani Angus’s Threading the Labyrinth takes the magic of those childhood books I already loved, and transforms it into something infinitely more complex, enthralling and fascinating.
*(Kilchoman – Loch Gorm, since you ask)
August 6, 2020
The language was lush and pretty, the plot knotted and confusing. Read for atmosphere.
May 7, 2020
I'm at the stage of the stay-at-home order where I'm craving beauty but am too tired to do the gardening or art that I want to -- homeschooling special needs 6 year-old twins is really, really hard, and God bless my 9 year-old for being remarkably fuss-free. So for these difficult times, a novel like Tiffani Angus' Threading The Labyrinth is the perfect balm. Featuring the beauty of gardens and art without skimping on what exhausting, difficult work they can be to create and maintain, it's a terrific reminder that life isn't just picture-perfect social media posts, that the things we appreciate take effort and time to bring into being. Almost without saying so, it's a reminder for us all to be a little kinder to ourselves if we're not perfect in our aspirations for love or beauty, because time is the great leveler.
And time, as much as gardens and art, is the central concern of this ghost story that travels between several distinct eras to tell us a multi-layered tale of inheritance and belonging. In 2010, American art curator Toni has discovered that she's been entailed The Remains, as she'll call it, of an English estate. The manor house is a crumbling ruin, but something about the walled garden calls to her. Almost four score years earlier, an actress named Irene will join the Land Girls, and come work that same garden to help prepare food for the war effort. An almost equal time before that, a young Victorian woman will inherit her aunt's talent and equipment for the newfound art of photography, even as she's asked to pose for the paintings of an artist coming to a crossroads in his career. And then there are segments following the American Revolutionary War, and even earlier, stretching back through time for a wide-ranging, loving look at the history of England and how it all comes together in this one secret, beautiful place.
As far as speculative fiction goes, this is definitely on the gentler side, with scares coming less from the supernatural aspects of the narrative than from the very ordinary human malice that challenges our heroines and heroes as they struggle to preserve the garden and its stories. That said, nature is creepy and will kill you without a second thought, so the thing with the vines totally freaked me out. I also enjoyed Dr Angus' quiet criticism of the mores that stifled women throughout the centuries, as well as the sex-positivity on display. Her writing is beautifully evocative of a beloved England, and while I enjoyed the acknowledgments of that country's colonial legacy, it was easy to tell -- in perhaps my only criticism of this book -- that Toni was written by someone not-American.
Threading The Labyrinth is at once a romance of England and a gorgeously layered story of ghosts through the centuries. It is a remarkable debut novel from an author whose work I look forward to reading more of.
And time, as much as gardens and art, is the central concern of this ghost story that travels between several distinct eras to tell us a multi-layered tale of inheritance and belonging. In 2010, American art curator Toni has discovered that she's been entailed The Remains, as she'll call it, of an English estate. The manor house is a crumbling ruin, but something about the walled garden calls to her. Almost four score years earlier, an actress named Irene will join the Land Girls, and come work that same garden to help prepare food for the war effort. An almost equal time before that, a young Victorian woman will inherit her aunt's talent and equipment for the newfound art of photography, even as she's asked to pose for the paintings of an artist coming to a crossroads in his career. And then there are segments following the American Revolutionary War, and even earlier, stretching back through time for a wide-ranging, loving look at the history of England and how it all comes together in this one secret, beautiful place.
As far as speculative fiction goes, this is definitely on the gentler side, with scares coming less from the supernatural aspects of the narrative than from the very ordinary human malice that challenges our heroines and heroes as they struggle to preserve the garden and its stories. That said, nature is creepy and will kill you without a second thought, so the thing with the vines totally freaked me out. I also enjoyed Dr Angus' quiet criticism of the mores that stifled women throughout the centuries, as well as the sex-positivity on display. Her writing is beautifully evocative of a beloved England, and while I enjoyed the acknowledgments of that country's colonial legacy, it was easy to tell -- in perhaps my only criticism of this book -- that Toni was written by someone not-American.
Threading The Labyrinth is at once a romance of England and a gorgeously layered story of ghosts through the centuries. It is a remarkable debut novel from an author whose work I look forward to reading more of.
May 17, 2021
https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3646632.html
A lovely novel about an English garden that connects a its contemporary American owner with past generations. I really love any work of literature that displays a rooted sense of place, dinnseanchas in Irish. Rather beautiful and engaging.
A lovely novel about an English garden that connects a its contemporary American owner with past generations. I really love any work of literature that displays a rooted sense of place, dinnseanchas in Irish. Rather beautiful and engaging.
January 3, 2021
I thoroughly enjoyed this novel of gardens, history and ghosts. The story is intriguing, unfurling as the reader spends time in the garden at the heart of the novel and meets the people whose lives have intersected with this magical place - some are born there, others spend only short periods amid the garden 'rooms' and shifting paths (a WWII land girl, a mid C19th artist). The garden is both an intense, heady space - physically debilitating at times - and also unknowable, amorphous, not adhering to the laws of time. Something I particularly admired was the focus on the lives of working people: though the garden is attached to a 'great house', it's the gardeners and their families who are given most time in this story, rather than the upper class owners whose stories often dominate when these settings appear in fiction. A hugely enjoyable novel, rich in detail, alive with colour and scent - a world I was sad to leave behind when I reached the last page.
September 2, 2020
Really immersive story. Loved winding my way through the history of the walled garden via the lives of those who lived and worked there. Everyone intertwined with the magical properties of the garden and the layers of (ghostly) lives and experiences that made the place what it was (and is). You do not have to be a keen gardener or know a lot about plants and flowers (I certainly don't) to enjoy this book. The descriptions are wonderfully and thoughtfully done; the characters are totally believable, and the story lives up to its title.
June 25, 2023
Simply beautiful
December 2, 2021
Tiffani Angus's debut novel Threading the Labyrinth tells the story of a garden, and its occupants, over four centuries of history; kind of a Children of Greene Knowe or Tom's Midnight Garden for adults, or possibly a serious version of the BBC's Ghosts. In the present day, Toni, a struggling gallery owner in New Mexico is surprised to be told that she has inherited the remains of a stately home in Hertfordshire, where she finds the remains of a walled garden which seems to change while she looks at it. Toni's explorations in the present are interspersed with stories from the past: the gardeners and servants who maintain the garden; the ladies of the manor whose inheritance the house and gardens are, but whose husbands have the power to control and change them without their wives' consent; the ghostly figures glimpsed in each generation.
This is a gorgeously written book; the descriptions of the garden and the plants are wonderfully vivid and evocative, and the characters feel real and rounded. The way the novel is structured means that the plot emerges gradually from the links between the different time periods rather than following a linear structure, and I did sometimes feel that I wasn't quite managing to keep up with what was going on, but it is a lovely and rather beguiling book and a very impressive debut.
This is a gorgeously written book; the descriptions of the garden and the plants are wonderfully vivid and evocative, and the characters feel real and rounded. The way the novel is structured means that the plot emerges gradually from the links between the different time periods rather than following a linear structure, and I did sometimes feel that I wasn't quite managing to keep up with what was going on, but it is a lovely and rather beguiling book and a very impressive debut.
January 30, 2021
A really magical read - eerie, enthralling and odd. I was absolutely gripped by this. Wonderful first novel.
August 12, 2020
I'm grateful to Unsung Stories for an advance copy of Threading the Labyrinth.
The premise of Threading the Labyrinth is simple. Toni Hammond, who owns a struggling gallery in Santa Fe, is surprised to inherit a crumbling manor house and overgrown garden in Hertfordshire, England. Investigating - might there be some money here that can rescue her business? - she finds no cash, but rather that the place holds impressions of many stories taking place over hundreds of years. It's hard for her to understand what's going on, but a link is forming with the history of the place...
One of my favourite stories by the celebrated ghost story writer MR James involves the inheritance of a house with a spooky old labyrinth in the garden and a mystery at its heart. A nice ghost story but as it's mostly about the unfortunate heir's attempts to survive, we learn little about the house of maze themselves. That is a story of terror, but in Threading the Labyrinth, though, Tiffani Angus turns things inside out and sites an elusive sense of love and belonging in her garden. Given only a scant set of family papers and with limited time before she must make a sale and return home, Toni is nevertheless drawn to uncover layers of her family's, and England's, past. We learn a great deal about the history of the place and about its people.
The story reaches back beyond the Reformation into local legend, when the nuns who originally lived in the house Toni labels "The Remains" thought they heard an abandoned baby crying in their garden. A baby they could never find. Dotting forward and back through later centuries, we meet the families who lived in the house and worked the gardens. Refreshingly, this is a bottom up perspective: the characters most strongly drawn are the gardeners and estate workers, not the gentry. There is a real sense of the endless, backbreaking labour needed to maintain the garden (the "weeders" are always women, even if the "gardeners" are men). English history is given in miniature and localised - while there are mentions of kings and wars (and men go off to fight in the wars, and sometimes come back) the detail, the important stuff, is what's happening "here".
So we see the people being turned off their land and their village relocated because His Lordship wants a pretty view (and more income). (Next time you visit a splendid National Trust property, ask if there are humps and bumps nearby where the old village used to be). We see struggle within families for a coveted place working the garden, with ignorant outsiders sometimes preferred over local people. We witness the profusion of new seeds and cuttings that exploration and colonialism open up (and can imagine the sources of wealth in the colonies that support the whole enterprise).
Always, the gardens abide, changing while staying same, with a particular walled garden the focus of things. A recurring figure links events and characters centuries apart - a soldier returning from the American war to find his sweetheart married to his brother, a Victorian artist struggling to make his mark, a group of Land Girls digging for victory in the Second World War. There are stories of people going missing, of children appearing out of nowhere. Angus's narrative touches on moments of great peril and loss as well as on moments of tenderness and love.
It's an outsider's view of English history. Angus's characters are, for the most part humble and generally women; the poor, strangers without a family, Victorian Aunt Madeline who makes her eccentric living from her camera, Irene who comes from London to work the land and mourns a terrible loss. Above all, while she has a family connection, Toni herself is an outsider, learning what Downton Abbey glossed over or ignored.
We are given fragments of their stories - sometimes we know how things turned out in the end, sometimes we don't. Some are linked (if only through a family name), others are separate - decades or centuries pass without a glimpse; though at times it's possible to conjecture what was happening, in other places there is a lot of detail. It's a scented, heady paradise of a book, rambling wild in places and with lots to discover in hidden corners. The language is lush, gorgeous, whether in simple phrases such as 'purse rummage', in the sheer smelliness of everything (the perfume of wet earth, the past as a smell not a sight, a kiss - 'And her mouth on him was as warm as a heavy lily under the summer sun. And she tasted how sugar smelled') or in the feeling of the light, with colours and smells often overlapping. Tragedy and loss are close to the surface - the young men who never came back from the Great War, the anxious scanning of the sky, even out here in the country, for enemy planes - but are never the end, just as the damaged, boarded up, forsaken house of The Remains seems poised to allow new things, to embrace change, and to celebrate the lives lived within its shadow.
The book called to me. I am married to a vicar, meaning we move around from one parish to another (one house to another) with no expectation of staying anywhere too long. So I am very familiar with adopting a garden and I've come to recognise the particular nature of the vicarage garden: overgrown, half-finished projects, unweeded borders choked with shrubs, glorious surprises left by one's predecessors. Every garden is a palimpsest. In Threading the Labyrinth we see how that complexity arises, both through loving labour and careless, even violent change at the whim of national history, economics and dynastic fluctuations.
Threading the Labyrinth is a glorious read, a book, perhaps, for the summer, to be read by an open window or sitting in the wilder parts of one's garden - or perhaps in the park, if no garden is available. I'd strongly recommend it.
The premise of Threading the Labyrinth is simple. Toni Hammond, who owns a struggling gallery in Santa Fe, is surprised to inherit a crumbling manor house and overgrown garden in Hertfordshire, England. Investigating - might there be some money here that can rescue her business? - she finds no cash, but rather that the place holds impressions of many stories taking place over hundreds of years. It's hard for her to understand what's going on, but a link is forming with the history of the place...
One of my favourite stories by the celebrated ghost story writer MR James involves the inheritance of a house with a spooky old labyrinth in the garden and a mystery at its heart. A nice ghost story but as it's mostly about the unfortunate heir's attempts to survive, we learn little about the house of maze themselves. That is a story of terror, but in Threading the Labyrinth, though, Tiffani Angus turns things inside out and sites an elusive sense of love and belonging in her garden. Given only a scant set of family papers and with limited time before she must make a sale and return home, Toni is nevertheless drawn to uncover layers of her family's, and England's, past. We learn a great deal about the history of the place and about its people.
The story reaches back beyond the Reformation into local legend, when the nuns who originally lived in the house Toni labels "The Remains" thought they heard an abandoned baby crying in their garden. A baby they could never find. Dotting forward and back through later centuries, we meet the families who lived in the house and worked the gardens. Refreshingly, this is a bottom up perspective: the characters most strongly drawn are the gardeners and estate workers, not the gentry. There is a real sense of the endless, backbreaking labour needed to maintain the garden (the "weeders" are always women, even if the "gardeners" are men). English history is given in miniature and localised - while there are mentions of kings and wars (and men go off to fight in the wars, and sometimes come back) the detail, the important stuff, is what's happening "here".
So we see the people being turned off their land and their village relocated because His Lordship wants a pretty view (and more income). (Next time you visit a splendid National Trust property, ask if there are humps and bumps nearby where the old village used to be). We see struggle within families for a coveted place working the garden, with ignorant outsiders sometimes preferred over local people. We witness the profusion of new seeds and cuttings that exploration and colonialism open up (and can imagine the sources of wealth in the colonies that support the whole enterprise).
Always, the gardens abide, changing while staying same, with a particular walled garden the focus of things. A recurring figure links events and characters centuries apart - a soldier returning from the American war to find his sweetheart married to his brother, a Victorian artist struggling to make his mark, a group of Land Girls digging for victory in the Second World War. There are stories of people going missing, of children appearing out of nowhere. Angus's narrative touches on moments of great peril and loss as well as on moments of tenderness and love.
It's an outsider's view of English history. Angus's characters are, for the most part humble and generally women; the poor, strangers without a family, Victorian Aunt Madeline who makes her eccentric living from her camera, Irene who comes from London to work the land and mourns a terrible loss. Above all, while she has a family connection, Toni herself is an outsider, learning what Downton Abbey glossed over or ignored.
We are given fragments of their stories - sometimes we know how things turned out in the end, sometimes we don't. Some are linked (if only through a family name), others are separate - decades or centuries pass without a glimpse; though at times it's possible to conjecture what was happening, in other places there is a lot of detail. It's a scented, heady paradise of a book, rambling wild in places and with lots to discover in hidden corners. The language is lush, gorgeous, whether in simple phrases such as 'purse rummage', in the sheer smelliness of everything (the perfume of wet earth, the past as a smell not a sight, a kiss - 'And her mouth on him was as warm as a heavy lily under the summer sun. And she tasted how sugar smelled') or in the feeling of the light, with colours and smells often overlapping. Tragedy and loss are close to the surface - the young men who never came back from the Great War, the anxious scanning of the sky, even out here in the country, for enemy planes - but are never the end, just as the damaged, boarded up, forsaken house of The Remains seems poised to allow new things, to embrace change, and to celebrate the lives lived within its shadow.
The book called to me. I am married to a vicar, meaning we move around from one parish to another (one house to another) with no expectation of staying anywhere too long. So I am very familiar with adopting a garden and I've come to recognise the particular nature of the vicarage garden: overgrown, half-finished projects, unweeded borders choked with shrubs, glorious surprises left by one's predecessors. Every garden is a palimpsest. In Threading the Labyrinth we see how that complexity arises, both through loving labour and careless, even violent change at the whim of national history, economics and dynastic fluctuations.
Threading the Labyrinth is a glorious read, a book, perhaps, for the summer, to be read by an open window or sitting in the wilder parts of one's garden - or perhaps in the park, if no garden is available. I'd strongly recommend it.
October 6, 2024
This is an extraordinary book. In a good way. I'm crap at writing reviews so ... where to begin.
Right, well the set up is that the heroine of the story, Toni, runs a gallery in California which is failing. She then discovers she has inherited an estate in the UK. Will it be the answer to her prayers, will she be able to sell the estate to save her business? Toni hot foots it to England to find out what she's inherited, but all she discovers is a gargantuan mountain of paperwork to sort out and a semi-derilict house that needs a lot of work.
It's not like anything I've ever read, which is what I look for in a book so it ticks all the boxes as far as I'm concerned. It flips from Toni in the modern day as she researches her options, to following the history of one particular part of the garden, a walled garden next to the house, and its relationship with the people who live and/or work on the estate.
This is a gloriously written, lyrical book. Even though I was trying to savour it I got sucked in, and read it swiftly in a couple of days. The descriptions of the garden at different times and seasons are hauntingly vivid. Likewise, the way the people involved in it are tied to those seasons, to one another and to the estate feels poignant and true along with a suggestion that we are little more than custodians of our surroundings, preserving them for future generations.
As we follow the history, along with Toni, we question love and loss and larger issues. Entirely against her better judgement, Toni is drawn to the house and especially the walled garden, and as she discovers the history of her family she begins to wonder if it would be possible, somehow, to keep the house and restore it.
As someone who was, at the time, wrestling with the tricky task of disposing of their parents' house and assets, this was the perfect book to read. I definitely felt a certain kinship with Toni as she grappled with the idea that a house, and its contents, have a story. And that when you inherit those things, what you are really looking at is how much of the story you want, or are able, to preserve for future generations, or for yourself.
A belter of a book. Thoroughly recommended.
Right, well the set up is that the heroine of the story, Toni, runs a gallery in California which is failing. She then discovers she has inherited an estate in the UK. Will it be the answer to her prayers, will she be able to sell the estate to save her business? Toni hot foots it to England to find out what she's inherited, but all she discovers is a gargantuan mountain of paperwork to sort out and a semi-derilict house that needs a lot of work.
It's not like anything I've ever read, which is what I look for in a book so it ticks all the boxes as far as I'm concerned. It flips from Toni in the modern day as she researches her options, to following the history of one particular part of the garden, a walled garden next to the house, and its relationship with the people who live and/or work on the estate.
This is a gloriously written, lyrical book. Even though I was trying to savour it I got sucked in, and read it swiftly in a couple of days. The descriptions of the garden at different times and seasons are hauntingly vivid. Likewise, the way the people involved in it are tied to those seasons, to one another and to the estate feels poignant and true along with a suggestion that we are little more than custodians of our surroundings, preserving them for future generations.
As we follow the history, along with Toni, we question love and loss and larger issues. Entirely against her better judgement, Toni is drawn to the house and especially the walled garden, and as she discovers the history of her family she begins to wonder if it would be possible, somehow, to keep the house and restore it.
As someone who was, at the time, wrestling with the tricky task of disposing of their parents' house and assets, this was the perfect book to read. I definitely felt a certain kinship with Toni as she grappled with the idea that a house, and its contents, have a story. And that when you inherit those things, what you are really looking at is how much of the story you want, or are able, to preserve for future generations, or for yourself.
A belter of a book. Thoroughly recommended.
September 14, 2020
꧁Ｒｅｖｉｅｗ꧂
•
•
𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐋𝐚𝐛𝐲𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐡 𝐁𝐲 𝐓𝐢𝐟𝐟𝐚𝐧𝐢 𝐀𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐬
•
•
“Behind the gate, people worked. They kneeled and weeded, pushed ghost wheelbarrows, trimmed ghost fruit trees, pruned ghost roses and vines. All silently. All without noticing me.”
•
•
𝐒𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲
Toni, the American owner of a failing gallery, is called to England unexpectedly when she inherits a manor house in Hertfordshire from a mysterious lost relative.
What she really needs is something valuable to sell, so she can save her business. But, leaving the New Mexico desert behind, all she finds is a crumbling building, overgrown gardens, and a wealth of historical paperwork that needs cataloguing.
Soon she is immersed in the history of the house, and all the people who tended the grounds over the centuries: the gardens that seem to change in the twilight; the ghost of a fighter plane from World War Two; the figures she sees from the corner of her eye.
•
•
𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐰
Thank you so much to @unsungstories and @Doc_tiff for allowing me to read a copy of Threading the Labyrinth for an honest review.
This is was a beautiful tale about a walled garden that has been loved over the centuries.
Each century was beautifully written and superbly thought-out. The way it woved with with the future and Toni’s story, was fantastic. And how we see them as ghosts who still work in the garden. My favourite character was Irene, her story was brilliant and I really connected with her. And Joan is definitely my nan.
I love this story so much. Having come from a very long line of gardeners and land workers. It brought my childhood memories back with helping my grandparents in their own conifer ‘walled’ garden.
And even today with sorting my own garden. Seen in the picture.
I will hold this story close to my heart.
I would highly recommend this book.
𝐑𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
•
•
𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐋𝐚𝐛𝐲𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐡 𝐁𝐲 𝐓𝐢𝐟𝐟𝐚𝐧𝐢 𝐀𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐬
•
•
“Behind the gate, people worked. They kneeled and weeded, pushed ghost wheelbarrows, trimmed ghost fruit trees, pruned ghost roses and vines. All silently. All without noticing me.”
•
•
𝐒𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲
Toni, the American owner of a failing gallery, is called to England unexpectedly when she inherits a manor house in Hertfordshire from a mysterious lost relative.
What she really needs is something valuable to sell, so she can save her business. But, leaving the New Mexico desert behind, all she finds is a crumbling building, overgrown gardens, and a wealth of historical paperwork that needs cataloguing.
Soon she is immersed in the history of the house, and all the people who tended the grounds over the centuries: the gardens that seem to change in the twilight; the ghost of a fighter plane from World War Two; the figures she sees from the corner of her eye.
•
•
𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐰
Thank you so much to @unsungstories and @Doc_tiff for allowing me to read a copy of Threading the Labyrinth for an honest review.
This is was a beautiful tale about a walled garden that has been loved over the centuries.
Each century was beautifully written and superbly thought-out. The way it woved with with the future and Toni’s story, was fantastic. And how we see them as ghosts who still work in the garden. My favourite character was Irene, her story was brilliant and I really connected with her. And Joan is definitely my nan.
I love this story so much. Having come from a very long line of gardeners and land workers. It brought my childhood memories back with helping my grandparents in their own conifer ‘walled’ garden.
And even today with sorting my own garden. Seen in the picture.
I will hold this story close to my heart.
I would highly recommend this book.
𝐑𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 6, 2021
Toni, an American arts dealer and owner of a failing gallery, is unexpectedly called to Hertfordshire after inheriting a Manor House. Leaving the New Mexico desert behind, she discovers her inheritance is a crumbling building and overgrown garden, and aptly names it the remains. The gardens change in the twilight, revealing ghosts of the past. Toni soon becomes immersed in the history of the place, drawn in by an unexpected hand and her own curiosity. And so begins Threading the Labyrinth, which really is the perfect title.
The story is beautifully written, offering an immersive experience as the richness of the gardens are vividly described from the perspectives of past and present. At times, reading the story felt akin to walking through an actual garden, where your thoughts drift and your eye wanders, drawn into the depth and detail of mature foliage, and the feeling that work is never done in a living space. For a while I felt I was losing the thread of the story, since more time is given to the voice of the past than to the present, and struggled with my expectations of Toni being the main character. Until I realised that, for me at least, the main character was in fact the garden itself, brought to life by everyone who has been a part of it. I suspect my experience as a reader was not dissimilar to that of Toni’s experience:
‘It’s in the shadows that you find the shape of things.’
Once I let go of my expectations and accepted the coexistence of past and present, I enjoyed this atmospheric, haunting and layered read.
The story is beautifully written, offering an immersive experience as the richness of the gardens are vividly described from the perspectives of past and present. At times, reading the story felt akin to walking through an actual garden, where your thoughts drift and your eye wanders, drawn into the depth and detail of mature foliage, and the feeling that work is never done in a living space. For a while I felt I was losing the thread of the story, since more time is given to the voice of the past than to the present, and struggled with my expectations of Toni being the main character. Until I realised that, for me at least, the main character was in fact the garden itself, brought to life by everyone who has been a part of it. I suspect my experience as a reader was not dissimilar to that of Toni’s experience:
‘It’s in the shadows that you find the shape of things.’
Once I let go of my expectations and accepted the coexistence of past and present, I enjoyed this atmospheric, haunting and layered read.
December 9, 2022
Threading the Labyrinth is my first book by this author and one of the most extraordinary reads of the year. The author describes it as “Tom’s Midnight Garden for adults” and there is an echo of that beloved children’s classic in the tale she has woven, but this is so much more. Set in a quintessential English garden of the type you will find in any stately home in Britain, the story weaves artlessly and seamlessly through the centuries with time a fluidic and loosely defined parameter.
When a young American woman, Toni, inherits a rambling manor house deep in the heart of Britain it forces her to confront a previously unknown family history. Exploring the remains of the house and garden, her senses are overwhelmed by what she finds. Echoes of the past, of the women who worked, lived, and loved in the garden bleed into Toni’s present. Are they ghosts? Figments of her imagination? Or symptoms of a breakdown?
This is not an easy read and demands your full attention. Be distracted for a moment and the plot will slap your wrist, punishing you with a subtle time and character shift that will have you turning back and re-reading to catch the transition. But, be prepared to immerse yourself in the shadows of the garden and you will be rewarded with a rich tapestry of lives that flow and impact those that come after.
A wonderfully moving and disturbing tale that will definitely linger.
When a young American woman, Toni, inherits a rambling manor house deep in the heart of Britain it forces her to confront a previously unknown family history. Exploring the remains of the house and garden, her senses are overwhelmed by what she finds. Echoes of the past, of the women who worked, lived, and loved in the garden bleed into Toni’s present. Are they ghosts? Figments of her imagination? Or symptoms of a breakdown?
This is not an easy read and demands your full attention. Be distracted for a moment and the plot will slap your wrist, punishing you with a subtle time and character shift that will have you turning back and re-reading to catch the transition. But, be prepared to immerse yourself in the shadows of the garden and you will be rewarded with a rich tapestry of lives that flow and impact those that come after.
A wonderfully moving and disturbing tale that will definitely linger.
September 5, 2023
George Orwell once said that in every fat man, there's a thin man trying to get out. I think something similar about novels, in that they are so often much longer than they need to be. 'Threading the Labyrinth' is a good example, being stuffed full of descriptive passages. That's not a bad thing in itself, but here they usually convey the laborious research behind them rather than the atmosphere they seek to create. Like the garden at the centre of the tale, it can feel oppressively lush. Reading this at the same time as a volume of Joan Aiken short stories, I was struck by how much more JA can do with a paragraph, even a sentence, than Angus can do with a page. or several pages, come to that. My view of the book is also not helped by a) it kept reminding me of the far superior 'Tom's Midnight Garden' and b) it has an annoying protagonist whose grating narrative voice soon outstays its welcome. There are some nice touches along the way and a few spooky moments, but reading it was something of a trudge and it would surely have been improved either by ruthless editing or by total surrender to its luxuriating impulses. I wouldn't have read it if it had been an 800 page Lucinda Riley doorstop, but at least then Angus would have had the space to give us even more botanical and architectural description to bathe in.
October 30, 2021
The old line about judging a book by its cover doesn’t apply to Threading the Labyrinth. Its cover accurately portends what lies within: Something beautiful.
Threading the Labyrinth is a series of stories connected by the English walled garden in which they occur, scattered throughout the centuries, and the ordinary person who inherits their legacy. In a sense, the novel is a cultural study of a way of life, but rather than romanticizing the aristocracy, as has been done all too often, it tells the stories of those who toil for them, the working hands that nurse the garden through the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. The writer brings the view of the foreigner become pseudo-native, retaining an outsider’s fresh eyes but understanding the culture enough to dismantle it on the page.
In this vein, a series of richly drawn characters come to life, and so does the garden, becoming a character in its own right, living, dying, and being reborn on the turning pages.
We could talk more about plot, but the virtual book jacket covers that sufficiently. A ghost, a dream, a slip in time — does it matter? The question may drive you through the book, but in the end you realize that what matters most is the lives that populate it.
Threading the Labyrinth is a series of stories connected by the English walled garden in which they occur, scattered throughout the centuries, and the ordinary person who inherits their legacy. In a sense, the novel is a cultural study of a way of life, but rather than romanticizing the aristocracy, as has been done all too often, it tells the stories of those who toil for them, the working hands that nurse the garden through the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. The writer brings the view of the foreigner become pseudo-native, retaining an outsider’s fresh eyes but understanding the culture enough to dismantle it on the page.
In this vein, a series of richly drawn characters come to life, and so does the garden, becoming a character in its own right, living, dying, and being reborn on the turning pages.
We could talk more about plot, but the virtual book jacket covers that sufficiently. A ghost, a dream, a slip in time — does it matter? The question may drive you through the book, but in the end you realize that what matters most is the lives that populate it.
April 22, 2024
I was entranced by this book from the outset. Toni Hammond, an American with a failing art gallery has inherited a rambling mansion and gardens in Hertfordshire, referred to in the now (2010) as ‘the remains’ in a terrible state of disrepair. She has given herself one week in the UK to sort it out. This is a ghost story and Toni encounters ghosts from the previous four centuries since the walled garden, which is integral to the story, was built. Periodically we step back into the past, or pasts of the house and especially the walled garden and find ourselves in each of the preceding four centuries, seemingly at random. Each story held me captive to its end and interlaced with the others. In large part it is the story of the walled garden which has a life of its own with its ghosts and suddenly growing plants which can wind themselves around a person. The description of the garden is an immersive sensual experience. You can hear the sounds, smell the scents of summer, touch the flowers and see the colours, taste the strawberries. Now reissued with the addition of a brand new story set in 1914, perhaps even more haunting than the rest. Highly recommend.
October 20, 2020
Overall this is a stunning story, full of beautiful descriptions of magical places. This story shows how we're closer to our forbears than we think and that the space between here and there really isn't very far at all; we're/they're just a whisper away.
I found I lost my way a couple of times about three-quarters of the way through but I back-tracked a little and found my way through the forest of time.
This is a page turner and if you're reading at night time have a clear time in your mind of how long you're reading for as I had two very late nights where I had to put it down at gone 3 am.
*The only reason this took me a while to read is because I took a break for my own writing deadlines. This really only took me about four nights to read. Looking forward to seeing more of Tiffani Angus' work.
I found I lost my way a couple of times about three-quarters of the way through but I back-tracked a little and found my way through the forest of time.
This is a page turner and if you're reading at night time have a clear time in your mind of how long you're reading for as I had two very late nights where I had to put it down at gone 3 am.
*The only reason this took me a while to read is because I took a break for my own writing deadlines. This really only took me about four nights to read. Looking forward to seeing more of Tiffani Angus' work.
April 19, 2021
An American arts dealer is left an historic stately English home. Despite her flailing business she jets off to look at the house to see what she can do with it, uncovering some ghostly secrets at the time.
Had real mixed feelings about this. It's a well written and constructed book and the moments set in the present I really enjoyed. But the bulk of the book is set in various periods of past history in and around the house and gardens and quite frankly they really bored me. A couple of them became more interesting as they progressed, as hints of ghostly hauntings came to the fore, but there was too little of this. Hardly anything seemed to happen in these segments and most of the characters weren't involving enough to carry them. Each time the book returned to the present it felt like a relief and towards the end I was ploughing through out of belligerence. Not for me this one.
Had real mixed feelings about this. It's a well written and constructed book and the moments set in the present I really enjoyed. But the bulk of the book is set in various periods of past history in and around the house and gardens and quite frankly they really bored me. A couple of them became more interesting as they progressed, as hints of ghostly hauntings came to the fore, but there was too little of this. Hardly anything seemed to happen in these segments and most of the characters weren't involving enough to carry them. Each time the book returned to the present it felt like a relief and towards the end I was ploughing through out of belligerence. Not for me this one.
July 4, 2024
Loved having read it, don't know if I will re-read*. My favorite parts were the ones that weren't given a lot of time and space and yet were at the center.
It's been so long since I read Tom's Midnight Garden that I didn't catch the parallels, but in the genre of books-written-by-American-Anglophiles, books-featuring-fairy-gardens, it's a favorite.
The structure is a bit given away in the title and some folks reviewing seem to have missed that and some certainly didn't appreciate it, but I agree it was the only way to tell the story. And I would've liked more of the contemporary personal story and more of the distant past, but that would've made it a longer book, and also changed the focus. And the focus on time and eternity was the whole point.
Anyway, a little gem, thank you.
*(Well gosh, just found that another, extended edition was published this year. I might look out for it.)
It's been so long since I read Tom's Midnight Garden that I didn't catch the parallels, but in the genre of books-written-by-American-Anglophiles, books-featuring-fairy-gardens, it's a favorite.
The structure is a bit given away in the title and some folks reviewing seem to have missed that and some certainly didn't appreciate it, but I agree it was the only way to tell the story. And I would've liked more of the contemporary personal story and more of the distant past, but that would've made it a longer book, and also changed the focus. And the focus on time and eternity was the whole point.
Anyway, a little gem, thank you.
*(Well gosh, just found that another, extended edition was published this year. I might look out for it.)
August 24, 2020
Toni, the American owner of a failing Art gallery, finds herself unexpectedly in possession of a crumbling Manor House along with its land and gardens.
Upon heading over to see what she has apparently inherited, all she finds is crumbling walls, a building that has seen better days and many an overgrown garden.
Soon she finds herself steeped in the history of the house: gardens that seem to change, ghosts of many forgotten people, and figures that keep shifting from her vision.
Just how far back does her heritage go?
This beautiful story follows Toni as she heads on over to an old Manor House that she has somehow came into possession of, but can’t seem to figure out how or why.
As she uncovers slithers of the past, both to do with herself and the house, just what will it all lead to?
This tale jumps between present day, and many points in the Manors history showing highlights of many a varied life in the grounds of this once palatial home.
Ranging from a war veteran, to her ladyship of the Manor, and even someone who maybe should never have been a part of the history to begin with...
Yet the gardens seem to shift not only with time, but with its own consciousness as it seems there is more here at play than what us mere mortals can fathom.
From plants growing to full bloom before your eyes, to ethereal beings cavorting amongst the living before disappearing from ones view...
Just how are all of these events connected to Toni? Will she discover the truth or will this living, breathing garden consume the secrets she is trying to unearth?
For anyone who loves Historical Fiction with a hint of the otherworldly, this is worth a read!
But beware, for you may lose more than just time in the ever-changing gardens.....🌹
Upon heading over to see what she has apparently inherited, all she finds is crumbling walls, a building that has seen better days and many an overgrown garden.
Soon she finds herself steeped in the history of the house: gardens that seem to change, ghosts of many forgotten people, and figures that keep shifting from her vision.
Just how far back does her heritage go?
This beautiful story follows Toni as she heads on over to an old Manor House that she has somehow came into possession of, but can’t seem to figure out how or why.
As she uncovers slithers of the past, both to do with herself and the house, just what will it all lead to?
This tale jumps between present day, and many points in the Manors history showing highlights of many a varied life in the grounds of this once palatial home.
Ranging from a war veteran, to her ladyship of the Manor, and even someone who maybe should never have been a part of the history to begin with...
Yet the gardens seem to shift not only with time, but with its own consciousness as it seems there is more here at play than what us mere mortals can fathom.
From plants growing to full bloom before your eyes, to ethereal beings cavorting amongst the living before disappearing from ones view...
Just how are all of these events connected to Toni? Will she discover the truth or will this living, breathing garden consume the secrets she is trying to unearth?
For anyone who loves Historical Fiction with a hint of the otherworldly, this is worth a read!
But beware, for you may lose more than just time in the ever-changing gardens.....🌹
September 10, 2020
I started this book, going in without knowing anything. It turned out to be a great story about a garden filled with ghosts. I loved all the flowers and garden talk, I loved how it jumped through different times (although in my kindle version it became a bit confusing at times - I've ordered the paperback and think that it'll be a bit clearer in that format), and I love the thought of time, the living and the dead, coexisting.
I got some really strong The Secret Garden vibes from the descriptions of tending the gardens, and I absolutely adored that!
I do enjoy books that kind of "just goes on" but I did think to myself at a few times that I wished it had had a clearer purpose? Compared to all the different times, the now felt a bit thin, and a bit too rushed at the end.
I got some really strong The Secret Garden vibes from the descriptions of tending the gardens, and I absolutely adored that!
I do enjoy books that kind of "just goes on" but I did think to myself at a few times that I wished it had had a clearer purpose? Compared to all the different times, the now felt a bit thin, and a bit too rushed at the end.
July 31, 2020
A labyrinth indeed
I don’t know how to describe this book, nor do I know how to rate it. They were images called up that put you right in the garden but so much of it was a ephemeral and fleeting. Perhaps that is what the author intended and I can see that this style would be popular with many people.
I don’t know how to describe this book, nor do I know how to rate it. They were images called up that put you right in the garden but so much of it was a ephemeral and fleeting. Perhaps that is what the author intended and I can see that this style would be popular with many people.
August 11, 2020
A lovely, immersive reading experience. Each period of time’s narrative was vivid and layered more significance and nostalgia upon the garden. By the time I finished, the garden had become so real to me it felt like I was saying goodbye to a beloved vacation spot in order to return to mundane reality. A great book to escape into.
August 19, 2022
It's been a long time since I've read a book with this sort of potential vs. payoff ratio. With the initial setup of the different "ghosts" in the garden I thought it was building towards something bigger but what it was building towards was something super duper vague. Why? What was even the point?
August 28, 2022
A truly fascinating novel that gradually unwinds its story in beautifully written turns and recursions, and gifts you with glimpses of the luminous wonders that inhabit the walled garden at the book's heart. There are some truly lovely characters to be found in the historical chapters. Very much recommended.
February 8, 2025
I loved this and was surprised by it. It’s inspiring and dreamy but also very real and (excuse the pun) earthy. You get a real itch for history and your hands in some soil or piece of artwork.
Not sure she quite stuck the landing but that might be my own personal feelings about neatly clipped endings. Skip the last 5 pages and i���m happy.
Not sure she quite stuck the landing but that might be my own personal feelings about neatly clipped endings. Skip the last 5 pages and i���m happy.
December 28, 2020
Great stories & historical insights
Loved this book with the mini stories & changing narrators. So beautifully written I could see & smell the walled garden. Have bought copies for christmas presents!
Loved this book with the mini stories & changing narrators. So beautifully written I could see & smell the walled garden. Have bought copies for christmas presents!
July 31, 2020
Gorgeous descriptions of the gardens. You will feel like you're lost in there yourself. Great story. I enjoyed it very much!
November 10, 2020
A pastoral and horticultural fantasy with gothic elements that chime beautifully with the numinous sense that runs throughout. Haunting without being frightening. Alluring and ethereal.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 38 reviews