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A Novel
by Ceridwen Dovey
From the award-winning author of Only the Animals comes an unputdownable novel of obsession, guilt, and the power of the past to possess the present.
Almost twenty years after forbidding him to contact her, Vita receives a letter from a man who has long stalked her from a distance. Once, Royce was her benefactor and she was one of his brightest protégées. Now Royce is ailing and Vita's career as a filmmaker has stalled, and both have reasons for wanting to settle accounts. They enter into an intimate game of words, played according to shifting rules of engagement.
Beyond their murky shared history, they are both aware they can use each other to free themselves from deeper pasts. Vita is processing the shameful inheritance of her birthplace, and making sense of the disappearance of her beloved. Royce is haunted by memories of the untimely death of his first love, an archaeologist who worked in the Garden of the Fugitives in Pompeii. Between what's been repressed and what has been disguised are disturbances that reach back through decades, even centuries. But not everything from the past is precious: each gorgeous age is built around a core of rottenness.
Profoundly addictive and unsettling, In the Garden of the Fugitives is a masterful novel of duplicity and counterplay, as brilliantly illuminating as it is surprising--about the obscure workings of guilt in the human psyche, the compulsion to create and control, and the dangerous morphing of desire into obsession.
"Starred Review. Sweeping both geographically and intellectually; a literary page-turner." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. Excavation both archaeological and psychological figures prominently in Dovey's gracefully constructed second novel ... It is Vita's smoldering melancholy about her apartheid-era origins that gradually gives way to total personal and creative collapse, allowing Dovey to express her ambivalence about creating art in an inequitable, exploitative world." - Booklist
"Rich and intelligent ... A striking work, both compelling and entertaining. Dovey is always a stylish writer, her language perfectly measured, her imagery precise. The settings are lush and tactile, the varied landscapes gorgeously rendered." - The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
"A marvel of tone and texture ... If, as Freud once said, the stones of antiquity speak to us, then Dovey is their exemplary oracle." - The Weekend Australian (Australia)
"Splendidly sinister ... The novel is richly imagined and Dovey is a terrific writer." - Herald Sun (Australia)
"A spellbinding pas de deux of passion, obsession and control. Mesmerizing and mind-expanding. I was transfixed." - Anna Funder, author of All That I Am
This information about In the Garden of the Fugitives was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ceridwen Dovey's debut novel, Blood Kin, was published around the world and selected for the National Book Foundation's prestigious 5 Under 35 honors list. The Wall Street Journal named her one of their "artists to watch." Her short story collection, Only the Animals, was published by FSG in 2015 and described by The Guardian as a "dazzling, imagined history of humans' relationship with animals." She lives in Sydney, Australia.
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