Dovey, C: In the Garden of the Fugitives

A literary tour-de-force of power, guilt and obsession - two people stalk each other through the shadowy, tangled web of the past - man and woman caught in a dangerous game of confession, each partly predator and partly prey... ‘It has been almost fifteen years. I‘ve thought about you often, mostly unkindly. But there: I have thought about you.‘ Nearly twenty years after Vita broke off contact with Royce, he writes to her, determined to excavate the past. He is older than her, a ghost from her university days, a former benefactor she has tried hard to forget. In his own youth, Royce spent two fateful summers working on a dig in Pompeii with a woman he would later memorialize with a scholarship - the same one that Vita eventually received. From opposite sides of the world, Royce and Vita enter into an adversarial dance: an attempt to settle old accounts. Profoundly addictive and unsettling, In the Garden of the Fugitives is a thrilling psychological examination of what happens when the lines are blurred between victim and predator, between loyalty and obsession. Praise for Ceridwen Dovey ‘Strange and richly imagined, haunting and atmospheric... [Dovey] unflinchingly illuminates human nature‘ The New York Times onOnly the Animals ‘Painfully beautiful, heartbreaking and riveting... Dovey voices the uncomfortable, she speaks the unspeakable... An ambitious book with a fable-like surface and a whole churning world beneath‘ Guardian onOnly the Animals