In the Garden of the Fugitives

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What to expect

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of In the Garden of the Fugitives by Ceridwen Dovey, read by Gabriella Maselli McGrail and Paul English.

A literary tour-de-force of power, guilt and obsession - two people stalk each other through the shadowy, tangled web of the past - man and woman caught in a dangerous game of confession, each partly predator and partly prey...


'It has been almost fifteen years. I've thought about you often, mostly unkindly. But there: I have thought about you.'

Nearly twenty years after Vita broke off contact with Royce, he writes to her, determined to excavate the past. He is older than her, a ghost from her university days, a former benefactor she has tried hard to forget. In his own youth, Royce spent two fateful summers working on a dig in Pompeii with a woman he would later memorialize with a scholarship - the same one that Vita eventually received.

From opposite sides of the world, Royce and Vita enter into an adversarial dance: an attempt to settle old accounts. Profoundly addictive and unsettling, In the Garden of the Fugitives is a thrilling psychological examination of what happens when the lines are blurred between victim and predator, between loyalty and obsession

Critics Review

  • This psychological thriller examines what happens when the lines between victim and predator, loyalty and obsession become blurred’

    Mail on Sunday
  • Spellbinding

    Anna Funder
  • Precise, cool, complex… [A] meditation on the gift of privilege

    Observer
  • Dovey does not shy away from bluntly confronting big questions head-on… Trembling with meaning, unsettlingly alive, sweeping both geographically and intellectually; a literary page-turner

    Kirkus
  • Gracefully constructed

    Booklist (starred review)

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