Lost in the Garden by Adam Leslie – #20BooksofSummer2025 No 9 and a DNF

I’m currently reading my 11th book of my 20, loving Sandwich so far – a brilliant summery read. But I had one DNF too – let me get that out of the way with a few comments.

The Appeal by Janice Hallett – DNF, 55/445 pages

This novel has been a huge bestseller – I’ve been recommended it by many friends. But it was just all too much! I gave up at page 55 – having already had enough of a novel written entirely in email and texts to last a lifetime, and there’s 445 pages of it.

There’s much to be said for using emails and texts, tweets and social media as part of a novel – as Cara Hunter does in her DI Fawley series – in the first one, Close to Home, there’s a twitter storm over a missing child, but a little goes a long way and she uses brilliantly it in vox populi sections between the main narrative parts.

The problem with total emails etc is that you have all the sender’s mostly churned out thoughts on show, ‘unedited’, which may make them true to life but I found tedious in the extreme, I felt no connection with any of the characters at all, so gave up.

Source: Own copy. Viper pbk, 445 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s via my affiliate link.

Lost in the Garden by Adam Leslie

Don’t you just adore the cover? The flower garland recalling the film Midsommar. It certainly hints at what’s to come. Leslie was/is a bookseller at Blackwell’s in Oxford and I read somewhere that he wrote some of it during his tea-breaks in the cafe. Published last summer by small indie Dead Ink, it won Leslie the Nero Fiction Award. I was very keen to read it then, but somehow it got buried. However, as I started it, I nearly put it down again thinking can I survive 446 pages of this style after my failure with a similar page count above? It begins thus:

Ice-cream van chimes elicit a synaesthetic Pavlovian response. The sound tastes of vanilla; it tastes of chocolate flake and neon-read spirals of strawberry sauce. It tastes of all the myriad possibilities illustrated in lurid colour beside the serving hatch. A miniature church cast in pinks and yellows and powder-blues, its oversaturated bells calling the children of the parish to worship. The communion wafer, the communion of soft-whip ice cream, the blessed chocolate flake rearing from its icy white hillock like the pole of the holy crucifix, waiting for the cross-bream, waiting in giddy anticipation to receive the condemned Christ in His martyrdom. And the swirl of strawberry sauce, right at the very end, representing the blood of Our Lord swirling down the hill of Golgotha.

A challenging first paragraph! But the ice-cream van chimes are a really important phenomenon in this novel – I saw them as more like the Pied Piper luring the hearer on to a possibly dreadful fate than a calling to mass. However, I’m getting ahead of myself. After the flowery opening , the text settles down into a normal style telling the story of Heather and her friends. However normal is really not the correct word for this novel. It has a rural folky setting with a dreamlike quality and creepy undertones. We know something is wrong almost from the outset.

After the strangers came nothing was the same again. …
It took the people a while to figure out where this sudden influx of strangers had come from, exactly who they were. …
Before long, though, people began to recognise relatives they’d recently buried. …
The were all dead. …
At first it was assumed they’d risen from their graves like zombies or vampires – but they were neither rotten nor bloodied, nor had any aversion to daylight. …
They were ghosts.

We meet Heather: twenty-something – fond of pulling peoples’ legs, not able to hold down a job really – basically not wanting to grow up. But she is forced to reevaluate things when her boyfriend Gabriel is found dead. They only realised he’d died when his ghost meandered around her house. ‘Heather cried for three days.’

Although not zombies, and although slow, the ghosts are capable of attacking, picking off and killing ‘the complacent, the picnickers and the sunbathers and the outdoor lovers.’ They proved impossible to kill, so most people just stayed out of their way. Heather, however, formed ‘The Chicken Club’ with friends Steven, Rachel, Sandy, John and Paulette – daring each other to evade ghosts in tricky situations.

By August, Sandy, John and Paulette had all disappeared.

Time passes, but summer remains. Heather and Steven are in a sort of relationship, One day she finds him packing.

‘Steven, why would I be upset? Where are you going?’
‘Almanby’
Heather felt as if someone had taken a big swing and thumped her hard in the stomach. ‘Almanby? You’re serious?’
‘I told you you’d be upset.’
What are you going there for?’
‘Because I want to.’
‘But… it’s dangerous. Everyone knows it’s dangerous. You’re not supposed to go to Almanby. That’s just… that’s just one of the basics.’
‘Have you ever been to Almanby?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Then how do you know?’
‘Everyone knows.’

And off he goes never to be seen again. When Heather hears a voice drifting through radio waves that she think is his, her determination to follow him increases. Eventually, she and Rachel set off on their own journey there with Rachel’s friend Antonia in tow, a comedian who is secretly in love with Heather.

A long, languorous and meandering journey follows, with plenty of the ghosts to evade, and things gradually oddly changing all around them – changing in a way that could make you imagine you’re going mad – moving, disappearing, transforming. Rachel and Heather will fall out and go their own ways, Antonia staying with Heather. They will eventually reach the picture-perfect but seemingly empty village of Almanby and will be led around (or up) the garden path trying to find the ice-cream van, and Steven’s house. The horror quotient begins to rise – and I can’t really say more.

This was a strange novel indeed, far too long yet not long enough! Truly meandering, you felt it was inhabiting a world where things, including time worked differently – or is that the Almanby effect? It was certainly beguiling and I was totally rooting for Heather throughout.

Leslie’s language is strange too – sometimes filtered through an intricate flowery kind of haze, a little detached from the action, it lulls you into a sense of relaxation. It reminded me a little of Yoko Okawa’s Memory Police in that respect, so that when something does happen you perk up instantly, although in a wordy, English way.

Having bought the paperback original above, I gave in and got the Blackwell’s exclusive, signed and numbered edition with neon pink spredges and endpapers too. I love that original cover though, so I think I’ll be keeping both for now.

Source: Own copies. Dead Ink paperback original, 2024, 446 pages. BUY either at Blackwell’s via my affiliate link.