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
Author Biography
Ceridwen Dovey's debut novel, Blood Kin, was published around the world, shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Award, and selected for the US National Book Foundation's prestigious '5 Under 35' honours list. The Wall Street Journal named her as one of their 'artists to watch'. Her collection of stories, Only the Animals, won the 2014 Readings New Australian Writing Award. She lives in Sydney.
