Threading the Labyrinth by Tiffani Angus
American owner of a failing gallery, Toni, is unexpectedly called to England when she inherits a manor house in Hertfordshire from a mysterious lost relative.
What she really needs is something valuable to sell, so she can save her business. But, leaving the New Mexico desert behind, all she finds is a crumbling building, overgrown gardens, and a wealth of historical paperwork that needs cataloguing.
Soon she is immersed in the history of the house, and all the people who tended the gardens over the centuries: the gardens that seem to change in the twilight; the ghost of a fighter plane from World War Two; the figures she sees in the corner of her eye.
A beautiful testament to the power of memory and space, Threading the Labyrinth tells the stories of those who loved this garden across the centuries, and how those lives still touch us today.
A poignant and elegant meditation on time and identity.
M. R. Carey, author of The Girl With All the Gifts
Tiffani Angus creates an absolute garden of delights, full of sensual mystery, strange dreams, and haunting and peculiar magic. A beautiful debut.
Alison Littlewood, author of The Hidden People and Mistletoe
If Robert Macfarlane wrote a ghost story this would be it. Haunting, delicate and multilayered, Angus channels her own humane understanding of our relationship with the quiet places of the world, the places hidden away, neglected, but always eager to blossom with the right kind of attention.
Helen Marshall, award-winning author of The Migration and Gifts for the One Who Comes After