In her mesmerising new book Salley Vickers, the bestselling author of The Librarian and The Cleaner of Chartres, writes with the profound psychological insight and sense of the numinous power of place that is the hallmark of all her novels. In Murat’s peaceful company, she discovers resemblances between her plight and his and as she works the garden, and walks in the mysterious ancient nearby wood, she begins to explore the history of the house, and its former lands, and old hurts fade as she experiences the healing power of nature and learns of other, hidden worlds. Most of all, she begins to analyse the love affair that ended leaving her with painful, unanswered questions. She is befriended by eccentric, sharp-tongued, Miss Foot, who recommends, Murat, an Albanian migrant, out of place in the village, to help Hassie in the garden.Īs Hassie works in the garden alongside Murat, she begins to ruminate on her past life, her hostile mother, her diffident father, and the sibling rivalry that tainted her childhood. While Margot continues her London life in high finance, Hassie is left alone to work the large, long-neglected garden. And then came the ending or epilogue or part 2 as the author called it.

She was awarded a state scholarship to St Paul’s Girl’s School and later went to study English at Newnham College Cambridge.

Her parents were members of the British Communist Party. The new novel from Salley Vickers, Sunday Times bestselling author of The LibrarianĪrtist, Hassie Day, and her sister, Margot, buy a rambling, run down Jacobean house in Hope Wenlock on the Welsh Marches. The story was set at the end of the 1950s and I got totally immersed in it, with its small town, its bittersweet, though at the same time very humdrum storylines, the library and the characters: both the sympathetic and the nasty ones. Salley Vickers is a Literature and fiction writer born in Liverpool, the UK.

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