The Garden of Lost and Found: The gripping tale of the power of family love

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Usually when I write a review, I like to give a brief overview of the characters and the synopsis of the book, however I have found it practically impossible to do this for The Garden Of Lost And Found. Using multiple threads intricately woven together Harriet Evans has created a wonderfully complex story that simply cannot be summed up in a couple of paragraphs. I also wanted to avoid talking at length about the story as it would be incredibly difficult to avoid spoilers! It's mostly set in two times and from two points of view although there are letters and chapters which span the intervening years and characters. Liddy and her great grand daughter, Juliet are the main narrators, Liddy the wife of a great Victorian painter, Juliet an art historian, specialising in late Victorian and Edwardian painting. After her marriage breaks down, Juliet takes her children to Nightingale House, Liddy's beloved home and that of her mother's before her, to recuperate. But the house is full of ghosts and secrets. Why did her great grandfather burn his greatest painting? What caused the rift between her grandmother and father? And how did her life take such a wrong turn? Harriet Evans writes so beautifully that I was drawn into the world of Nightingale House. I could picture it so clearly in my mind whether it was the grand house that Ned and Liddy shared, the slightly decaying version that Juliet moves to or even the doll’s house version so loved by the children throughout the generations. She creates an image of a bygone golden era but shows also how it all came crashing down so suddenly, with the repercussions reverberating through the decades which followed.

The Garden of Lost and Found maps a tangled network of sexual, familial, and financial complications, over which hangs the specter of 9/11. A hallucinatory, lyrical, and often darkly hilarious portrait of 21st-century America. It was a shame as the idea was good, but poorly executed. It didn't grip you, and for a book that length it really does need to. When Ned and Liddy's great-granddaughter Juliet is sent the key to Nightingale House, she opens the door onto a forgotten world. The house holds its mysteries close but she is in search of answers. The story opens in 1918 with Liddy Horner as she discovers her renowned artist husband Sir Edward ‘Ned’ Horner burning his best-known painting in an apparent moment of madness. Days later, Ned has died of a fever and Liddy is left alone with a baby. Moving forward in time to 2014, we meet Liddy’s great granddaughter Juliet, an expert in Victorian art, who’s at a crossroads in her life. She’s been pushed out of her job at an auction house, she has a fractured relationship with her husband, and she’s lost the ability to connect with her three children. So when she’s mysteriously sent the key to the dilapidated Nightingale House – Liddy and Ned’s beloved home – she sees it as not only an escape from her crumbling marriage, but a new start for her children too. Sir Edward Horner, the most celebrated artist of his day, destroys his world-famous painting, THE LITTLE BIRDS , shortly before his death. But why?This book met very mixed reactions from our group. Many felt it as too busy with too many characters who were not properly realised.

Overall, I found this book very enjoyable, lovely and gripping to read. It was exactly what I needed from this audiobook, praise to Harriet Evans. The novel follows the generations of a family from 1880-1918 and then in present day. The bonds between a granddaughter and a grandmother are strong, surviving the grave. When Liddy was a child, always afraid, she had dreamed of her own home, hidden away where no-one could find her. When she could be safe. Then Ned brought her here and for a few years everything had been perfect.The story was bot motherhood: Lyddie’s refusal to allow and operation that might save her child’s life, Stella cutting Juliet off when she married Matt, Juliet’s idealisation of what a mother should be and how her children should behave and the house was another child to be looked after too. The painting the Garden of Lost and Found not only depicted a lost pre-war wold but also the depiction of motherhood. One set of characters lived through World War I. It was billed as ‘exciting’ and ‘an adventure’. The reality was a bloodbath, from which, if you survived would haunt you for the rest of your life.