Description
In the Garden of the Fugitives by Ceridwen Dovey is a literary novel about obsession, control, guilt and the complicated ways in which the past shapes identity. Almost twenty years after forbidding Royce, her former benefactor and mentor, from contacting her, Vita receives a letter from him. Now ageing and unwell, Royce has unfinished business, while Vita’s filmmaking career has stalled. Their renewed correspondence develops into an intimate exchange in which both attempt to settle old scores and gain some control over the stories they have carried for years.
As their shared history unfolds, Vita grapples with the shame attached to her birthplace and the disappearance of someone she loved. Royce, meanwhile, remains haunted by the death of his first love, an archaeologist who worked at the Garden of the Fugitives in Pompeii. Moving between personal histories and buried secrets, Dovey explores the uneasy relationship between memory, desire and deception, and how the need to create or control can become an obsession.
