The Garden Against Time

Resumen del libro

What a wonderful book this is. I loved the enchanting and beautifully written story but also the fascinating and thoughtful excursions along the way. Nigel SlaterA garden contains secrets, we all know that: buried elements that might put on strange growth or germinate in unexpected places. The garden that I chose had walls, but like every garden it was interconnected, wide open to the world . . .In , Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew her into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens.Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Miltons Paradise Lost to John Clares enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.But the story of the garden doesnt always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. Its also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris. New modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change.The Garden Against Time is a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.

Biografía del autor

Olivia Laing es una aclamada crítica y escritora. Escribe sobre arte y cultura para The Guardian, el Financial Times y The New York Times, entre muchos otros medios, y ha escrito ensayos para los catálogos de varios artistas contemporáneos, como Andy Warhol, Agnes Martin, Derek Jarman, Wolfgang Tillmans y Chantal Joffe.<br> Asimismo, es autora de siete libros, incluidos To the River, El viaje a Echo Spring, La ciudad solitaria y Todos los cuerpos. Su primera novela, Crudo, un relato en tiempo real del turbulento verano de 2017, se situó entre los diez libros más vendidos de la lista de The Sunday Times y ganó el James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Sus libros se han traducido a veintiún idiomas. <br> Es socia de la Royal Society of Literature y en 2018 fue galardonada con el Windham-Campbell Prize por su obra de ensayo.<br> Vive en Suffolk.