Nick Newman’s The Garden is set in an unknown time and place, in a walled off garden on a large estate where two elderly sisters live alone, with no knowledge of the outside world or contact with anyone else. There seems to have been some sort of huge climatic shift or catastrophe when the sisters were girls, and they have been shut away since then. They only remember the world outside from when their home was still open to it, long ago. They aren’t clear on what happened, just that it became a very dangerous place, and they believe it to still be that.
The garden is all they know, all they have known for many, many decades, and it has now started to surprise them. They find a half fertilised egg in the chicken coop, they find apples falling to the ground much earlier than usual, they find a broken down part of the boundary wall, and though they do not know what lies beyond the wall, they begin to wonder at how much of the outside is creeping into their garden. One day, Evelyn starts to sense another presence in the boarded up parts of their house, where “there were black and poisonous things […] that were best left undisturbed,” and she wonders “for the first time in an age, what might have been left inside the house when they abandoned it. What might have grown there in their absence.”
Their quiet little life is changing, and so their story changes; their present and their future do too. All Evelyn and Lily have known is the garden. It is what keeps them alive—not just does it feed them, it also gives them purpose. It is why they get up in the mornings, it is why they have something to do each day as per the almanac of systems and rules their mother left for them. But the things that are happening now make the almanac, their bible for survival, appear irrelevant. Seasons seem to be changing, patterns shift and there is potentially another huge storm on the horizon. But the biggest, most shocking change comes when they discover a young man has broken into their space. His presence first confuses the sisters, and then brings a certain chaos and disorder to their lives and their relationship that they could never have expected.
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The routines they devotedly followed rapidly change, as do the sisters’ personal dynamics. Who are Evelyn and Lily when they are not alone? How do they each react to a third person? How does their relationship change, when there is someone else in their heavily guarded space, both physical and metaphorical? There has never before been any reason for the sisters’ relationship to evolve or change, but now, with the addition of a new person (and personality), they are forced to reckon with aspects of each other they either hadn’t noticed before or had chosen to ignore. The balance of their odd little isolated lives tips, throwing Evelyn especially into spirals of anxiety as she worries about what else could be infiltrating their microcosm.
The sisters are unique characters each, and both have an entirely different approach to life. Evelyn is often nervous, worried about what she didn’t learn from her mother, what things were left undone, untaught, undisclosed. Lily instead is excited by the unknown, curious and far less concerned by responsibility—and so she, more so than Evelyn, starts to question all they have been told. The changes to the garden weave into the feeling of dread that creeps up on the reader, never overbearing, but never letting go. While his prose is sure and poetic, Newman never lets us forget that something out there has its claws firmly in us.
The Garden is acclaimed children’s writer Nicholas Browning’s first foray into writing for adults, published under the pseudonym Nick Newman. It is then no surprise that he has managed so effortlessly to write two lead characters who have such a childlike quality about them. Though elderly, both Evelyn and Lily maintain a certain naiveté—and of course they do, given that they were locked away from the world when still quite young. They may have aged, but they retain a great deal of their childhood innocence in many ways.
We know about their past, and about Evelyn’s anxieties, from the fragmented memories the sisters have of their past—shady incidents they recall vaguely, strange conversations they were told to keep secret. These secrets are kept from us too, eventually revealed not in a loud crescendo, but with a deft, quiet subtlety that is nonetheless startling. We question how far the sisters and their mother have gone to survive, how much was sacrificed. When the world changes so much and so fast, how much do people change too, and in what ways; how much do they have to bury in order to keep living? And what’s it all for?
It is, of course, for love. Love at the end of the world, love between parents and children, between sisters and the ones we choose to call family and care for, no matter what shared trauma or violence we may have experienced. This story is a sweet, earnest look at aging too, as we see who the sisters used to be, and who they are now. A reminder, then, that sometimes we remain in the roles we were cast in as children, no matter how much we have aged, no matter what disasters the world has experienced.
The Garden is a tender, gentle novel about the bond between two sisters, but is it also very much a story of climate change, too, as experienced by two older women living in a contained, controlled tiny microcosm that has somehow existed as a sort of pocket universe for them. It is also a well-crafted gothic story about isolation, catastrophe and fear, with a constant eerie undertone that permeates much of the natural beauty of the garden, as well as the language of the novel.
The Garden is published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
Read an excerpt.
