This time Ivan also had full freedom to choose a book for you with no instructions from me or anyone else.

While I was reading The Gardener, I found myself reacting to it, like Hassie regarding her untameable garden, “with a mixture of awe and resentment”. And life, in any case, is both far too big and far too beautiful for us to spend it locked down inside ourselves, no matter how safe a wall might enable us to feel. Hassie is haunted by memories of two men: her recently deceased father and her former lover, Robert, a married man with whom she had an affair. The book has several strands: family disjunction, sibling rivalry, racial prejudice but the theme that most involved me was that of our wanting relationship to nature and the sweep of the virus, which is the dark side of nature, and our vulnerability to it went to reinforce my strong sense that as a race we humans had better come to better terms with these natural forces if we are to continue to live comfortably on this planet. If “control over nature” equals control over ourselves, then it comes as no surprise, in this environment, that Hassie finds herself unable to hold back those unthinkable thoughts.

It was a joy to read a book where the words were important with an extensive but easily understood vocabulary. These two remarkable gardeners, dreamers, builders and plantsmen deserve my sincere thanks for allowing me to join them in their garden. One section of the garden was dedicated to raspberry canes, currant and gooseberry bushes and tangled blackberry brambles, which used to make into strange potions while playing in the garden. The satisfying neatness of the novel is defined firstly by an opening address to an unknown person and a concluding one to a now named one, secondly by Hassie’s narrative mirroring Nelly East’s journals, and thirdly by the way the relationship between Margot and Hassie is unpeeled and recast.

By forcing her to accept that she “can’t manage this” alone, Hassie’s unexpectedly wild garden also lays a path out for her into three close relationships, in a village where she was convinced she would find none. The Gardener is what I deem comfort reading — a lovely, well-written story that is not such a page turner that I am compelled to read non-stop, but is entrancing enough that I looked forward to picking it up before bed or in random moments of freedom. As months pass, Lydia Grace makes friends with the other employees of the bakery and she learns how to knead bread, while teaching others the Latin names of all flowers she knows. The lovingly described recreation of a neglected garden and the healing power of nature were captured beautifully and unlike others I liked the way the story was bookended by short first person commentary. Knowing she will need help with the heavy digging required, she employs Murat, an Albanian refugee to help her in the garden.the novel also perpetuated some harmful ideas about women‘s bodies and their value, and it portrayed romantic love as hugely sexual (at least for Hassie) which i found very boring and unimaginative. It can’t be a coincidence that Vickers refers to Lolly Willowes at some point, so I was expecting some witchery, but sadly it never came to much. Once, on one of Michael's leaves, he had taken her over a munition factory, where she saw the progress of a shell from blank-iron to the all but finished article.

It proved to be a block of some two or three hundred graves whose headstones had already been set, whose flowers were planted out, and whose new-sown grass showed green. I had already worked with Celtic history in “Cousins”, where St Cuthbert makes a ghostly appearance, and I decided to set this book in this part of the British Isles, where vestiges of Celtic Christianity can still be found.It gives her a chance to process her father’s death, think about her upbringing and reflect on a love affair she had with a married man that went painfully wrong, the story of which is told in snatched flashbacks tinged with drama and excitement. Most important is Murat, the Albanian-born Corfiot expat who becomes the novel’s eponymous gardener after answering Hassie’s notice in the post office window. T ea in a crowded mauve and blue striped wooden structure, with a false front, carried her still further into the nightmare. The Gardening Book gives you the basics to grow over 100 popular flowers, foods, shrubs, houseplants and more - each one has a clear, concise, format: what you need, timing, method, and step-by-step photos, all on one spread. The novel is set against the backdrop of post-Brexit hostility towards immigrants and people of colour.