The Sunday Times number one bestseller
Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize, the Kirkus Prize and Waterstones Book of the Year
‘A garden contains secrets, we all know that: buried elements that might put on strange growth or germinate in unexpected places. The garden that I chose had walls, but like every garden it was interconnected, wide open to the world…’
In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew her into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens. Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.
But the story of the garden doesn’t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It’s also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change.
The result is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.
Order in the UK: Amazon, Blackwell’s, Bookshop.org, Donlon, Foyles, London Review Bookshop, Waterstones (signed), WH Smith, Wordery
Order in the US: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Bookshop
Read: FT essay, Guardian extract, New York Times essay, House and Garden feature, Irish Times interview, Independent interview
Listen: R3 Private Passions, R4 Start the Week, RTE Arena, Spectator podcast, Worms podcast, Intelligence Squared, Digging with Flo
Images of the garden: here
Publicity: sam@sam-talbot.com
UK press/events: emma.bravo@macmillan.com
Coming soon: Italian, German, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Ukranian, Finnish
‘This isn’t a historical survey of gardening, much less a practical guide, so much as an inquiry into the idea of the garden — its history and poetics, its relationship to sex, imagination and power. Laing belongs in an as-yet-undefined and perhaps undefinable class of prose artists who blend feeling and analysis, speculation and research, wit and instruction as they track down the elusive patterns and inescapable contradictions of modern experience.’ New York Times
‘Buzzing and epic…like all Laing’s works, this one is a joyful expansion on the meaning of the subject it undertakes… The history of gardens and gardening is a fascinating subject, but The Garden Against Time asks for more. Laing seeks a communal space where we can cherish what is most beautiful about being alive. The possiblities are what matter.’ Washington Post
‘The kind of book that will continue to bloom in the minds of readers as it ages, revealing new connections each time it’s picked up…In a time of forced binaries and ubiquitous oversimplification in mainstream culture and public thought, I’m thankful for seekers like Laing, those who insist upon the possibility of more lush, reciprocal entanglements between people and the land.’ Los Angeles Review of Books
‘Could we make the world a better place? How exquisite to hold a book that makes me believe so.’ Financial Times
‘The Garden Against Time, despite its darker subtexts, feels like a recuperative work.’ Irish Times
‘A sharp and enthralling memoir of the garden’s contradiction: dream and reality, life and death, the fascination of cultivation and the political horrors that it can disguise.’ Neil Tennant
‘What a wonderful book this is. I loved the enchanting and beautifully written story but also the fascinating and thoughtful excursions along the way.’ Nigel Slater, The Kitchen Diaries
‘No one writes with more energy and ecstasy than Olivia Laing. This book is what we need right now: paradise, regained.’ Philip Hoare, RisingTideFallingStar
‘Laing probes important questions about land ownership and exclusion and the human drive to create paradise on earth. All the while, her elegant prose bewitches and beguiles. A truly wonderful read.’ Sue Stuart-Smith, The Well-Gardened Mind
‘Olivia Laing is a marvellous writer. So prepare yourself to be enchanted.’ Jilly Cooper