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The Garden Against Time

Audiobook
Nonfiction
Unabridged   9.25 hour(s)
Publication date: 06/25/2024

F O R T H C O M I N G ! Available June

The Garden Against Time

In Search of a Common Paradise

Available from major retailers
Digital Download ISBN:9781696615501

Summary

Inspired by the restoration of her own garden, "imaginative and empathetic critic" (NPR) Olivia Laing embarks on an exhilarating investigation of paradise.

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Product Description

Named one of the most anticipated books of 2024 by the BBC, the Observer, Irish Times, the Guardian, and The Millions.

In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there's still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton's Paradise Lost to John Clare's enclosure elegies, from 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 doesn't always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It's also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated 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 climate change. The result is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.

Reviews/Praise

"An intellectually verdant and emotionally rich narrative journey." —Kirkus Reviews Starred Review

Author Bio

Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. She's the author of seven books, including The Lonely City, Funny Weather, and Everybody. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages and in 2018 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction. She lives in Suffolk, UK.