The Garden
A Novel
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR FROM KIRKUS AND VANITY FAIR
"Genius."—The New York Times Book Review • “A teeming gothic.”—Vanity Fair • “Few novels of literary fiction are written as well as The Garden."—The LA Times
An eerie, masterful novel about pregnancy as a haunted house and the ways the female body has always been policed and manipulated, from the award-winning author of The Illness Lesson (“A masterpiece” – Elizabeth Gilbert)
In 1948, Irene Willard, who’s had five previous miscarriages in a quest to give her beloved husband the child he desperately desires, is now pregnant again. She comes to an isolated house-cum-hospital in the Berkshires, run by a husband-and-wife team of doctors who are pioneering a cure for her condition. Warily, she enlists herself in the efforts of the Doctors Hall to “rectify the maternal environment,” both physical and psychological. In the meantime, she also discovers a long-forgotten walled garden on the spacious grounds, a place imbued with its own powers and pulls. As the doctors’ plans begin to crumble, Irene and her fellow patients make a desperate bid to harness the power of the garden for themselves—and face the unthinkable risks associated with such incalculable rewards.
With shades of Shirley Jackson and Rosemary's Baby, The Garden delves into the territory of motherhood, childbirth, the mysteries of the female body, and the ways it has always been controlled and corralled.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Beams follows up her acclaimed novel The Illness Lesson with an atmospheric story of a strange obstetrical clinic in late-1940s Western Massachusetts. Irene is young, in love with her husband George, and pregnant for the sixth time, the first five pregnancies having ended in miscarriage. In hopes of carrying her baby to term, she enters a residential treatment center run by a married doctor couple in the Berkshires. The clinic is housed in an ancestral estate whose depiction by Beams as "a mammoth, patient creature" owes much to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. There, prickly and recalcitrant Irene joins "like-circumstanced women" for a strict regiment of rest. She forms an uneasy alliance with two fellow patients, know-it-all Margaret and amiable Pearl, and together they discover a walled garden on the estate that has supernatural properties, the details of which would be a spoiler to mention. Beams adeptly conjures the clinic's heightened atmosphere, populated as it is by desperate pregnant women willing to subject themselves to just about anything to birth healthy babies ("The only thing she was more afraid of than staying was leaving"). The author's fans will delight in this inspired and unsettling work.
