Garden by the Sea

<p>For six summers in the 1920s, a wealthy couple invites their friends to stay at their villa, with its garden overlooking the Mediterranean. They drink and dine, play games, gossip, and flirt, and use and abuse their little paradise. Their antics are all related by the gardener, whose own relationship with the place is tainted by the loss of his wife, once a maid there at his side.

The garden provides both backdrop and conduit for every turn in the glamorous couple's lives. And even when tragedy takes hold, the grumbling but loyal gardener translates every development into the language he knows best: that of the flowers he tends.

With this achingly beautiful tale of glamour and betrayal, Rodoreda brings a Fitzgeraldian spike to the heady cocktail of the Catalunyan coast.</p>