Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Celebrated by The New York Times Book Review as "a gifted prose stylist," Ceridwen Dovey, the critically-acclaimed author of Blood Kin, presents a tale of obsessive love, control, identity, and ideas as an old man rediscovers his life and the woman whose life he helped change.
In the Garden of the Fugitives takes the form of an exchange of letters between Vita, a South African woman now living in Australia, and Royce, an older man who was responsible many years earlier for awarding Vita a fellowship to study in the United States. Their dynamic, as the letters unfurl, is completely unexpected.
A tale of obsesssive love, control, identity, and ideas, which moves from Mudgee in Australia to the United States via pre- and post-apartheid Cape Town and new and ancient Pompeii, Ceridwen Dovey's In the Garden of the Fugitives is remarkable and unique.
Synopsis
Almost twenty years after forbidding him to contact her, Vita receives a letter from a man who has long stalked her from a distance. Once, Royce was her benefactor and she was one of his brightest protegees. Now Royce is ailing and Vita's career as a filmmaker has stalled, and both have reasons for wanting to settle accounts. They enter into an intimate game of words, played according to shifting rules of engagement.
Beyond their murky shared history, they are both aware they can use each other to free themselves from deeper pasts. Vita is processing the shameful inheritance of her birthplace, and making sense of the disappearance of her beloved. Royce is haunted by memories of the untimely death of his first love, an archaeologist who worked in the Garden of the Fugitives in Pompeii. Between what's been repressed and what has been disguised are disturbances that reach back through decades, even centuries. But not everything from the past is precious: each gorgeous age is built around a core of rottenness.
Profoundly addictive and unsettling, In the Garden of the Fugitives is a masterful novel of duplicity and counterplay, as brilliantly illuminating as it is surprising - about the obscure workings of guilt in the human psyche, the compulsion to create and control, and the dangerous morphing of desire into obsession.