The Garden

The Garden

By Clare Beams
Unabridged
$13.00 $20.00
Save 35.0%
Quantity:
window.theme = window.theme || {}; window.theme.preorder_products_on_page = window.theme.preorder_products_on_page || [];
No one writes feminist historical fiction like Clare Beams. With her singular lyricism, elegance, and candor, The Garden powerfully illuminates what is, for many women, a private and isolating grief. Ingeniously using elements of the gothic and weaving in today’s most pressing questions about female bodily autonomy, Beams captures the magic, strangeness, terror, and all-consuming pressure of pregnancy, as well as the desperate desire for certainty and the abiding hope. I’m in awe of this book.
Jessamine Chan, author of The School for Good Mothers

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.