The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing

Finalist for the 2024 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction Finalist for the 2024 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing A #1 Sunday Times (UK) Bestseller • A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A New Yorker and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2024 • A Chicago Public Library Must-Read Book of 2024 • An Oprah Daily "Most Thought-Provoking Book" of 2024 Inspired by the restoration of her own garden, "imaginative and empathetic critic" (NPR) Olivia Laing embarks on an exhilarating investigation of paradise. In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there’s still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s 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. Read more