The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
Olivia Laing (Picador, £20)
LIKE some of the best blooms, this is a hybrid: part memoir, part commonplace book. It stems from the author and her poet husband’s acquisition of a house in Suffolk, as covid began to rampage. Acknowledging an air of sickness and transience, as well as the fragility of the author’s own family, it nonetheless remains a generous tale, full of hope, charming linocuts and passionate insights.
