THE GARDEN
Cult(ivating) sisters
★★★★★
▶ RELEASED
30 JANUARY 288 pages
Hardback/ebook/audiobook
► Author Nick Newman
▶ Publisher Doubleday
Very often, SF is a genre of giant vistas: of starships that take generations to reach their destination, of wars that convulse entire galaxies, and of posthuman evolution millions of years into the future. But it’s equally good at taking a tiny and apparently mundane setting, and turning it into something jarringly, alienatingly strange.
With the exception of a brief epilogue, The Garden is completely set in a single garden. True, it’s the garden of a stately home, and so considerably less tiny than any lawn most of us have ever had to mow. But for its gardeners, sisters Evelyn and Lily, its fruit trees and vegetable patches and beehives are the whole world.