Olivia Laing

The Garden Against Time (eBook, ePUB)

The Number 1 Sunday Times Bestseller

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

'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

'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 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.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Pan Macmillan
• Seitenzahl: 320
• Altersempfehlung: ab 18 Jahre
• Erscheinungstermin: 2. Mai 2024
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781529066685
• Artikelnr.: 68545181

Autorenporträt

Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. They're the author of several books, including The Lonely City, Everybody and Funny Weather. Their first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the 2019 James Tait Memorial Prize. Their work has been translated into twenty-one languages and in 2018 they were awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction.

Rezensionen

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