[Laing's] lyrical prose emphasizes the ways in which gardens connect individuals across history...leading the author to muse that her attraction to cultivating plants stems from wanting "to move into a different understanding of time: the kind of time that moves in spirals or cycles, pulsing between rot and fertility, light and darkness." This is well worth seeking out.-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)"

Through deft research and her own experience in this enchanting [book]... Laing considers the loftier aspirations of gardens as paradise.--Lauren LeBlanc "Boston Globe"

A book that begins as beguiling and beautiful then flicks into the revelatory: the work of salvaging a ruined garden in Suffolk becomes a book about a different kind of salvation altogether. Her mind is so agile, so capacious, so widely ranging, so consistently surprising. If I had the means, I'd present her with large plots of land every year so that she could write books such as this again and again.--Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others

Laing probes important questions about land ownership and exclusion and the human drive to create paradise on earth. All the while, her elegant prose bewitches and beguiles. A truly wonderful read.--Sue Stuart-Smith, author of The Well-Gardened Mind

The Garden Against Time is remarkably vulnerable in its function as a vehicle for Laing to think through the pain of others; to mend her own shortcomings and live purposively on her patch of land...Could I live this way: thoughtfully, keeping in mind the fortunes of others? Twee as it sounds, if we all did, could we make the world a better place? How exquisite to hold a book that makes me believe so.--Jo Hamya "Financial Times"

Laing's piece resonates with an idea that applies not just in the backyard or the grand estate but everywhere: The garden itself is neither good nor evil, but the gardener makes it so.--Peter Catapano "New York Times"

[A] broad-leafed prose poem about 'the constant cycle of decay, regeneration and return in which we all play a part.' This is a beguiling book.--Gavin Plumley "Country Life"

A vital read in the age of climate crisis.-- "Elle"

What we need, writes Laing, is more gardens and the health and life and collective imagination they support everywhere. Echoing Victorian gardener, writer, and artist William Morris, Laing argues that 'we need to start from our contaminated present and not some future position of undiluted purity.'-- "Bomb"

The Garden Against Time, despite its darker subtexts, feels like a recuperative work.--Patrick Freyne "Irish Times"

I don't think I've ever read a book that captures so well not only the deep pleasures and satisfactions of gardening, but its near-hypnotic effect on the human body and mind.-- "Observer"

An intellectually verdant and emotionally rich narrative journey.-- "Kirkus (starred review)"

Olivia Laing's The Garden Against Time is a close and vagrant meditation on the tended plot as real and metaphoric paradise, a potentially radical place to overwinter and come back out to hope.--Brian Dillon "The Millions"

A cumulative intellectual with a golden pen, Laing... connects collectivity with dirt, hand-building both private and generous new worlds as safe refuge and risky experiments.--Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show

[L]andscape writing so intricate and vivid that you'll feel transported to the English countryside.-- "Oprah Daily"

I've been a fan of Laing's since The Lonely City, a formative read for a much-younger me...so I'm looking forward to her latest, an inquiry into paradise refracted through the experience of restoring an 18th-century garden at her home the English countryside. As always, her life becomes a springboard for exploring big, thorny ideas (no pun intended)--in this case, the possibilities of gardens and what it means to make paradise on earth.--Sophia M. Stewart "The Millions"

In one way Laing's book is an account of restoring the garden to its glory days. This gives her the chance to write such glorious, looping sentences as 'I cut back thickets of honeysuckle and discovered astrantia, known as melancholy gentleman for its stiff Elizabethan ruffs and odd, pinkish-green livery.' But just at the point where she seems in danger of disappearing into a private dreamscape, Laing pulls up sharply to remind us that a garden, no matter how seemingly paradisical, can never be a failsafe sanctuary from the brutish world. It always arrives tangled in the political, economic and social conditions of its own making...In this book Laing perfects the methodology she deployed so skillfully in her much-loved The Lonely City and more recent Everybody, of embedding biographical detours to advance rather than merely illustrate her central argument.--Kathryn Hughes "Guardian"

[Laing] excelled at looking at art in The Lonely City, her meditation on urban isolation in the lives and works of American painters, and she brings the same quality of attention to [The Garden Against Time], writing about her garden with a vigor that should carry even the least green-fingered reader...a wise and enthralling book.--Max Liu "Independent"

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Pub date: 2024-06-25

Length: 336 pages