The Seed Collectors
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
"I have no idea why everyone thinks nature is so benign and glorious and wonderful. All nature is trying to do is kill us as efficiently as possible."
Great Aunt Oleander is dead. To each of her nearest and dearest she has left a seed pod. The seed pods might be deadly, but then again they might also contain the secret of enlightenment. Not that anyone has much time for enlightenment. Fleur, left behind at the crumbling Namaste House, must step into Oleander's role as guru to lost and lonely celebrities. Bryony wants to lose the weight she put on after her botanist parents disappeared, but can't stop drinking. And Charlie struggles to make sense of his life after losing the one woman he could truly love.
A complex and fiercely contemporary tale of inheritance, enlightenment, life, death, desire and family trees, The Seed Collectors is the most important novel yet from one of the world's most daring and brilliant writers. As Henry James said of George Eliot's Middlemarch, The Seed Collectors is a 'treasurehouse of detail' revealing all that it means to be connected, to be part of a society, to be part of the universe and to be human.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Just like any real-life family, the Gardener clan elicits affection and laughter as well as scorn and embarrassment. The Seed Collectors follows this family of renowned botanists as they navigate their bohemian matriarch’s death and reflect on a collective history marred by tragedy. Novelist Scarlett Thomas’ flesh-and-blood characters are inquisitive, lascivious, renegade, depressed, in and out of love—in other words, fully alive. We loved learning about the Gardeners’ world and getting to be a fly on the wall for their most intimate thoughts and fiery conflicts.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Botany and human sexuality regularly intersect, stimulating the characters and the reader alike in Thomas's (PopCo) newest. The story opens with a long and multilayered chapter set at the funeral of elderly Oleander Gardener, whose country estate in England, Namaste House, includes a large orangery. The childless Oleander has several nieces and nephews Fleur, Clematis, Charles, Lavender, Plum, and Bryony who catch up, share thoughts on the future, and argue at the funeral. Questions of inheritance and a mysterious seed pod that each of her heirs receives constitute the framework of a tenuous plot, but these are primarily MacGuffins. Fueled by intellectual curiosity and joie de vivre (as much Thomas's as her characters'), the story fans out to the heirs, primarily Fleur and Bryony. Each views the world through a naturalist lens that echoes the deceased Oleander. Botanist Fleur has a discussion with a fellow passenger on an airplane, the topic of which veers from a Hebridean spotted orchid to Rihanna and Kate Moss. And Bryony, whose daughter, Holly, is experiencing the daily changes of puberty with wonder, sees human sexual parts nearly everywhere in plants. Ebullient prose, engaging characters, lively imagination, illuminating details Thomas is an original, and her novel is consistently entertaining.
