About the Book
From the critically acclaimed author comes an eerie, psychologically thrilling novel about womanhood and bodily autonomy
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'Pet Sematary meets Rosemary's Baby with a literary sheen' NEW YORK TIMES
'A feminist voice for the 21st century' JOYCE CAROL OATES
'Prepare to be haunted' RACHEL YODER
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It's 1948, and Irene Willard is pregnant for the sixth time.
After five miscarriages, she checks into an isolated hospital that promises to deliver this child safely.
Between examinations and experimental treatments, she discovers a mysterious garden on the grounds, where the boundary between life and death is strangely permeable.
As the doctors' plans crumble, Irene tries to harness the power of the garden for herself.
But she must face the unimaginable risks associated with such unimaginable rewards...
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More praise for The Garden
'Truly original' DAILY MAIL
'Page-turning, horror-infused' LITHUB
'A dreamlike chiller' OBSERVER
'I'm in awe if this book' JESSAMINE CHAN
'A shimmering, strange, important novel' RUFI THORPE
About the Author :
CLARE BEAMS is the author of the novel The Illness Lesson, which was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, which won the Bard Fiction Prize and was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016. She was a finalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize.
Review :
Richly gothic... The genius of the novel is the way Beams continually intertwines fictional elements with true-to-life obstetric practices... the ambiguity floating freely through it is perfect for Beams's intentions.
A dreamlike chiller that carries shivery echoes of everything from Rosemary's Baby to Pet Sematary
A truly original piece of storytelling
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.
Page-turning, horror-infused... Shirley Jackson meets The School for Good Mothers in Beams' careful, beautiful prose.
Clare Beams casts an intoxicating spell with The Garden, a gothic tale about nature's dark whims and the unknowable chaos of matrescence. Prepare to be haunted.
Pleasingly atmospheric... Pet Sematary meets Rosemary's Baby with a literary sheen
The Garden is a novel to devour whole. It is a page-turner, a puzzle, an assembly of piercing insights into womanhood, ambition, and autonomy, in language as bewitching as it is exact.
The Garden's gender politics, barbed wit, moral complexity, and genuine sense of unease recalls the best of Shirley Jackson's work... This swirling marvel of a novel cements Clare Beams as a read-everything-she-ever-writes writer."
Deliciously eerie and brilliantly written, Beams explores motherhood and gestation in a way that feels new and trailblazing, but that will also ring true to the lived experience of every woman who has ever been pregnant. A shimmering, strange, important novel - I couldn't put it down.
Clare Beams is a master of fiction... Born in the literary legacy of Angela Carter and Stephen King, The Garden is, like every child, utterly itself in the end - miraculous and beautiful and strange.
The Garden is a shimmering, sinister jewel of a novel, with an aching, Shirley Jackson-like heart. Highly recommended!
The Garden renders beautifully the uncanny, haunted space that pregnancy both occupies and creates. Beams's glancing, needle-prick prose reminds me of Shirley Jackson's work in its ability to conjure up women - their histories, their fears, the complexity of their desires, and their power. I loved this novel.
Beams' writing sets her apart, shimmering against the dark subject matter... where a lesser writer might have fallen back on ableist tropes of 'monstrous' children, Beams treats her subject with a careful moral imagination. Like an overgrown garden - untamable, lush, and wild in ways lovely and terrifying.
A taut, tense, absorbing Gothic tale that deftly explores the complexity of women's inner lives and their varied relationships to motherhood.
Owes much to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House... inspired and unsettling
A teeming gothic
The Garden is a thrilling novel, a nightmare all the more haunting for feeling so real. Acutely and with insight on every page, it captures the isolation, anxiety, and lunacy that can be involved in pregnancy, especially in a system in which women aren't given agency.
