The Sea Garden By Deborah Lawrenson

I was lucky to hear Deborah read extracts from The Sea Garden at the Parisot Literary Festival last month.  It was made the more poignant as I finished reading it on Armistice Day.  The Sea Garden is made up of three linked novellas.  The first story is set in the present day and is about Ellie Brooke a young woman recently widowed, who travels to Porquerolles, an island off France’s Azure Coast.  Ellie is a landscape gardener and has been asked by a wealthy, eccentric client to restore a memorial garden at the Domaine de Fayols.  All is not what it seems though and, in contrast to the beautiful island, there are some dark, mysterious happenings at the Domaine de Fayols.  

The second story is set in 1944 at the height of the resistance movement in Provence.  It is the story of Marthe Lincel, a trainee perfume maker, who is blind.  Marthe is a character from Deborah’s previous novel The Lantern.  This story culminates in a resistance night flight operation, which is fraught with tension. 

The third story begins in the Second World War and is about Iris Nightingale a junior intelligence officer.   This is different in that it follows Iris from her war days to the present day when she is in her nineties.  It is in this story that the link between the three women becomes clear.  I enjoyed this story the most because it tied up all the loose ends.  The cover of The Sea Garden is stunning and you can almost smell the lavender fields of Provence thanks to Deborah’s sensuous writing.

The Art of Falling by Deborah Lawrenson

Set in Italy the story opens with Isabel Wainwright as she embarks on a trip to the town of Petriano.  Her father, Tom Wainwright, arrived in the town in 1944 as a British soldier, just as the Second World War was coming to an end.  Here he got to know the Parini family and fell in love with their eldest daughter, Giuliana. It was here that he saved a child’s life from a bombed building.  To honour his heroism the town want to rename a piazza after him and Isabel goes to Italy to accept the honour on her father’s behalf.  She struggles to explain to the people who so warmly welcome her that she doesn’t know whether her father is dead or alive because her father left home twenty years ago, when she was seventeen, and he hasn’t been heard of since.  He went out one day and never came back and she and her embittered mother, Patricia, have been trying to come to terms with this fact ever since.  Isabel remembers that her father was infatuated with the Leaning Tower of Pisa so it is here she goes in the hope of retracing his footsteps and to learn more about him.  Here she meets Matteo and falls in love.  The book alternates between the point of view of Isabel in the present and Tom in the past.  The descriptions of Italy were magical.  A thoroughly enjoyable read.