Reading: Threading the Labyrinth

[white_hart]

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.

Comments

[lokifan]

You had me at "Tom's Midnight Garden for adults"!