The Gardener

The new novel from Salley Vickers, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Librarian and Grandmothers.

Artist Hassie Days and her sister Margot buy a run-down Jacobean house in Hope Wenlock on the Welsh Marches. While Margot continues her London life in high finance, Hassie is left alone to work the large, long-neglected garden. She is befriended by eccentric, sharp-tongued Miss Foot, who recommends Murat, an Albanian migrant made to feel out of place among the locals, to help Hassie in the garden.

As she works in the garden in Murat's peaceful company, Hassie ruminates on her past life: the sibling rivalry that tainted her childhood and the love affair that left her with painful, unanswered questions.

But as she begins to explore the history of the house and the mysterious nearby wood, old hurts begin to fade as she experiences the healing power of nature and discovers other worlds.

In her haunting new novel, Salley Vickers, the bestselling author of The Librarian and The Cleaner of Chartres, writes with profound psychological insight and a sense of the numinous power of place that is the hallmark of all her novels.

"Salley Vickers sees with a clear eye and writes with a light hand. She's a presence worth cherishing." - Philip Pullman

"The Gardener is a novel of regrowth and regeneration, of sisters overcoming a toxic parental legacy and of the healing power of seed packets. The perfect fictional promise to draw us through a harsh winter." - Patrick Gale

"Steeped in a sense of the redemptive power of place, Sally Vickers's 11th novel is a paean to green-fingered regeneration that is both rigorous and charming." - Observer.