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The Garden Against Time

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What to expect

The Garden Against Time is the No.1 Sunday Times bestseller from acclaimed writer Olivia Laing; a passionate, epic exploration of the power and possibilities of gardens.

'What a wonderful book this is' – Nigel Slater

When Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants, the work drew them into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens.

Moving between the real and the imagined, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to 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 can also be a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams, from the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the vision of a common Eden cultivated 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 radical change.

‘This book is what we need right now: paradise, regained’ – Philip Hoare
‘Every generation gets one perfect book about gardens and this is ours’ – Julia Bell
‘Prepare yourself to be enchanted’ – Jilly Cooper
‘The most magical writing’ – Jeremy Lee
‘I felt doubly alive after reading it’ – Celia Paul
‘Quite literally unputdownable’ – Jinny Blom
‘A book for thinking gardeners everywhere’ – Mary Keen

Critics Review

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
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 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
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, author of The Well Gardened Mind
No one writes with more energy and ecstasy than Olivia Laing. This book is what we need right now: paradise, regained
Philip Hoare
This book is as imaginatively structured and full of beauties and surprises as the garden whose creation it documents
Lucy Hughes-Hallett, author of The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War
Every generation gets one perfect book about gardens and this is ours
Julia Bell
Olivia Laing is a marvellous writer. So prepare yourself to be enchanted
Jilly Cooper
The most magical writing, intimate, insightful, learned and brilliant
Jeremy Lee, restaurateur and author of Cooking: Simply and Well, for One or Many
An extraordinary and important work. I felt doubly alive after reading it. The book is an inspiration.
Celia Paul, author of Self-Portrait
It takes its rightful place in the constellation that includes Jamaica Kincaid, Russell Page, Derek Jarman, and Jenny Uglow
Neel Mukherjee
A magisterial work, and the exacting sensuality of her garden writing is pure pleasure, delight, surprise. It is a triumph, from a writer at the height of her powers
Francesca Segal
Quite literally unputdownable. It is astonishing, funny, beautiful, wise, charming and truthful
Jinny Blom, author of What Makes a Garden
A sensational work, somehow encompassing so many diverse preoccupations with a confidence and control that kept me spellbound
Isabel Bannerman
Olivia Laing has written a book about making her garden, which is by turns lyrical, consoling, disturbing and inspiring. It’s a book for thinking gardeners everywhere
Mary Keen
Powerful, reflective and captivating to read - I loved it.
Fergus Garrett
A vital read in the age of climate crisis
Elle
I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that captures so well not only the deep pleasures and satisfactions of gardening, but its near-hypnotic effect on the human body and mind
Observer
Could I live this way: thoughtfully, keeping in mind the fortunes of others? Twee as it sounds, if we all did, 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
[Laing] excelled at looking at art in The Lonely City (2016) her meditation on urban isolation in the lives and works of American painters, and she brings the same quality of attention to her new book, writing about her garden with a vigour that should carry even the least green-fingered reader . . . a wise and enthralling book
Independent
A beautiful book that explores the garden as a political site – of sanctified and at times selfish seclusion in an unequal world
Guardian
There is much to relish in this abundant book
Telegraph
Gorgeous, enchantingly constructed non-fiction about the power and beauty of gardens
Harper's Bazaar
Laing writes with joy and spirit.
New Statesman
In her soaring new memoir, The Garden Against Time, [Laing] wrestles with the political significance of the garden and asks fundamental questions about humans’ relationship to the land and to each other. The result is a book not only lyrical but informative and quietly profound . . . Laing loves the beauty of gardens, and the toil of working within them. Sharing her unashamed passion is a pleasure and a privilege.
The Tablet
Enchanting . . . What makes this captivating book more than an elaborate journal of gardening and its fraught history is Laing’s insistence on Jarman’s idea that “paradise haunts gardens"
Boston Globe

User Reviews

Book 5.0
Narration 5.0
Author Olivia Laing
Narrator Olivia Laing
Duration 9 hours and 18 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781529066692
Format Audiobook
Publisher Pan Macmillan
Genre Garden design and planning, Gardens (descriptions, history etc), Landscape gardening, The countryside, country life: general interest
Collections Five Star Listens
Availability GB, IE
Rating
5.0 (1 review)
Narration
5.0 (1 review)

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