Statues in a Garden

Description

'Just the right mixture of doomed fun, melancholy and faintly lascivious despair' Observer 'I am afraid I have something to tell you. It is that we are all about to be destroyed.' 1914. The old standards are going. There is bitterness in politics, talk of civil war in Ireland. But all this means little to Cynthia Weston, attractive wife of cabinet member Aylmer Weston, and her nephew by marriage Philip. They are caught up in the charmed, perilous toils of a mutual passion that will destroy all they hold most dear - while the shadow of war lengthens and darkens, ready to swallow their world whole. A captivating portrait of a lost world, Statues in a Garden is a rediscovered masterpiece by one of the most important and neglected British female writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Isabel Colegate was born in 1931. As well as working as a literary agent, she is the author of thirteen novels, (including The Shooting Party, which was adapted into a film in 1985) and one collection of short stories. She lives in Somerset.

Colegate's novels offer readers clear-eyed, illuminating windows onto this now bygone world ... Colegate has no equal ... In shining a light on the past, Colegate also illuminates the present * Paris Review * She should be a household name -- Eleanor Catton An extraordinary achievement -- Frances Wilson * Times Literary Supplement, Summer Reading Picks 2020 * Stylish, funny, as vivid and brilliant as a painting on glass * Daily Telegraph * Combine the slightly offbeat sensibility of Muriel Spark with the milieu of an Iris Murdoch novel and you'll have something of an idea about this witty tale * BBC Culture * She writes so gracefully and with such skill that her "private fable" acquires a truly fabulous quality * Times Literary Supplement * Threads of romance, social comment, country lore and intrigue both above and below stairs are cunningly worked together to create a brilliant tapestry * Sunday Telegraph * Remarkable ... I can think of no work of fiction that brings [this period] to life so fully and subtly * Washington Post * 'Isabel Colegate is not afraid of ideas nor of using fiction to express them ... In this rich and fascinating book, someone is hiding something - possibly everyone is. Time itself obscures the truth. Can the past be known? Or is what we call history the best of recollection, not absolute but consensual, and always subject to interpretation? * Los Angeles Times *