Night Gardener

The Night Gardener is more than a memoir; it is a quest. Literature, music, the art of storytelling, fly fishing, gardening as an expression of our deepest selves, the nature of memory, and the desire to story our own lives are its subject. Ultimately, transcendence through storytelling is the secret strength at the heart of Sandor's life, work, and play.These twenty essays form a startlingly honest and passionate narrative that strikes a mesmerizing balance between the domains of the domestic and the creative.Sandor is bold and heretical, witty and learned. From fishing in an alligator-infested lake and hiking through grizzly territory to seeking a way to ease her young daughter's pain after separating from her husband, she explores wildness and solace in both the outdoors and the mind.Each essay is dramatic and beautifully formed - full of wit and the author's insatiably curious mind. She brings to these works the electricity and thrilling imagination that ignite her highly acclaimed fiction. And through these essays emerges a portrait of a mother, scholar, fly fisher, and gardener living each role with furious passion. She also is a writer of glorious talent, able to wield this last with the control and virtuosity of the true artist. (53/4 X 81/2, X 212 pages)

"Ranging from childhood reminiscences to her life after separating from her husband, Sandor, whose first collection of short stories (A Night of Music) won a Rona Jaffe Award for fiction, offers 20 finely observed and expressive personal essays....Although some of the pieces are more engrossing than others, this is a thoughtful collection by a talented writer." Publishers Weekly

"Gracefully, [Sandor] lures us up and down her streams of thought with simple yet distinctive language as she investigates the natural world and seeks to define her own place in it." Katharine Weber, The New York Times Book Review

"Sandor...is a smart and witty essayist. Here, in 20 linked, storylike memoirs, she teases out the truth about her parents' lives, muses on her own experiences as the mother of a daughter, and chronicles her journey from her childhood home in California to life with her husband in Boston, Florida, and Oregon. Nothing earthshaking occurs, yet a quiet suspense charges every page as Sandor's pluck and rebelliousness emerge....Several fresh, funny, and thoughtful essays...chronicle her forays into the angler's realm, but it is gardening that evolves into the collection's central metaphor as she, like Eve, must leave paradise in pursuit of knowledge." Donna Seaman, Booklist

"There's a distracted, plangent tone to Sandor's memoir, which unspools in episodic glimpses of bruised sensibilities, indigo moods, and moments when she wakens to brief pleasures....Her life proceeds as a series of half-steps and aches, of not quite measuring up to expectations...and the saving grace comes in an unexpected package, her staid father's friend and opposite, Uncle Maury, who lives and breathes literature....Then she falls in love with someone other than her husband (both men remain ciphers, unlike her father and Uncle Maury), and her separation from her daughter ushers Sandor back into a lost country of regret and remembrance, a landscape of guilt and grief that readers will have little mercy for having brought on her own head. Sandor might see her life as Mozart his music, a 'passion for comedy in the midst of the sublimely sad,' but she brings ruefulness, not play, to the endeavor." Kirkus Reviews

"Sandor here assembles 20 short pieces about her life. They range from her early years in Southern California as the youngest child of four, through a number of fly-fishing outings and time spent teaching in Florida and Oregon, to life as a wife and then as a single parent. Her engaging style draws us into her predicaments, whether it is tolerating the ever-present Florida alligators or enduring judgments on her attempts at gardening. Throughout, she effectively conveys the force of memory as a determinant in one's choices..." Library Journal