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.
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