Thanks to Canongate and NetGalley for the Advance Review Copy in exchange for an honest review.

It seems to me that, in general, Canongate is incapable of publishing a duff book. This novel is written by a South East Asian author and the cover is also downright gorgeous. Canongate? Asian Author? Pretty cover? I'm on board.

So how was it? I'll admit that on the face of it, some might not think the synopsis is the most exciting thing in the world. A young woman wishes to build a Japanese garden to honour the memory of her sister? But this book is so much more than that.

The story follows the main character, Yun Ling, a Straits Chinese woman, through various periods of her life. We see her present as a Judge about to begin her retirement, and also glimpses into her past as a survivor of a Japanese internment camp and her apprenticeship as a gardener with Aritomo, a famous Japanese garden designer.

The novel takes place in the Cameron Highlands of what was Malaya, and the beautiful, lush setting contrasts with some of the horrors that have taken place there during and after the war. The novel looks unflinchingly at the atrocities of war and it's aftermath, the consequences of loss and grief, as well as exploring the historical context of colonial Malaya, the Communist insurgency and it's eventual journey towards independence from the British. The novel has moments of brutality, abuse, violence and inhumanity but also love, remembrance, friendship and sublime moments of peace and joy.

What I particularly liked was that this is a novel where nothing is black or white. There are no easy answers to why things happen and why people do what they do. The complex characters exist on a spectrum of greys as opposed to being simply 'good' or 'bad'. The characters were multi-layered, if a little hard to get to grips with sometimes. I particularly liked the character of the tea planter Magnus (he just seemed like an all round top bloke), and his relationships with those around him. I felt like he was the real beating heart of the story.

This is a beautiful, subtle story which is very readable despite some of its more tragic and difficult moments. Some of the threads of this story are left untied at it's conclusion and there are mysteries left unresolved and things left unsaid. If you like everything wrapped up nice and neat in a pretty bow then this maybe isn't the book for you. As for me? I absolutely loved it.

A truly fantastic novel shot through with a beautiful love story and wonderfully detailed historical elements. You can tell why it was nominated for the Booker - exciting, mysterious and a highly accomplished book.

This is a book about war and the impacts of war, and a book about Japanese gardens. It's very beautiful.

At one point, the classic Japanese garden is described as a series of experiences. As we pass through the garden, we move from one to the next, without necessarily seeing the whole thing at any stage. This book is a bit like that. :Layers are peeled away, stories are uncovered, each one leading to greater understanding.

It's set in Malaya, now Malasia, moving from the present to WWII and the post-war period. Yun Ling, our heroine and narrator, is reviewing her past, taking us to her experiences in a Japanese internment camp, and her post-war apprenticeship with a famous Japanese garden designer. Post war Malaya is a dangerous place, with communist guerilla groups kidnapping and assassinating politicians and prominent people, and with the British trying to decide how to get out of this country, having spectacularly let down the population during the war.

There is pain, and anger in this book, but also the meditative beauty of traditional Japanese pasttimes, and there are Japanese who also tell their stories of the horrors of war. It's a time and a place I know very little about, so the historical aspects were fascinating, but for me the best bit was the way people build relationships despite history and politics. It's beautifully written, too, and captures that time and place in a really meaningful way. Well worth a read.

There’s no denying that The Garden of Evening Mists is a wonderful piece of literature. The writing is beautiful and tragic at the same time, with hidden meanings buried deep within the characters words. It also manages to peel away the many layers of one woman’s incredibly complicated life in Malaya, and the horrors of war, in an almost cinematic way. It’s atmospheric, with a hint of mystery, and you can feel the level of passion and conviction the author brings to the story.

But, and this is a big but, I couldn’t love the story. I tried, but I found too many things that distracted me enough to stop me from falling into the richness of the text. For one, I found the dual story telling, which flits between the past and the present, disrupted my enjoyment and flow of the text. I much prefer linear story telling, as it allows me to enjoy the journey alongside the characters. The writing, although excellent, does also lean towards the over-the-top side of descriptive at times, which added to the distracted nature of the story. I found I was largely unmoved by the various horrors I was reading, which proves to me how little involved I got with the story.

I also found the pace incredibly slow. Not a lot happens for the first 25% of the book, and at times I was willing anything, or anyone, to do something. Even when the pace does pick up, it tends to ebb and flow to the point where you spend a lot of time reading descriptions of gardening.

Yun Ling is reserved and detached and I found her romance with Aritomo stilted and uncomfortable. I couldn’t warm to either of them, and found them quite one dimensional in terms of their character development throughout the book. Yun Ling comes across as quite cold at times, without an ability to express anything. I understand this is probably a result of her time as a prisoner of war, but it did nothing to endear her to me. I found I didn’t care. The secondary characters are even worse, with little or no backstories to support them, and nothing to distinguish between them.

Beautiful writing, it this needs a more powerful character to bring it to life and make me feel something.

I finished more than halfway through this book, and I still don't know what the story is. I honestly don't think there is one.

The writing is too frilly for my personal taste. I found the characters difficult to connect with; I didn't care about them or what had happened to them, and the lack of emotional investment led to a disconnect.

Note to publisher: I did not rate this on Goodreads as I didn't think it was fair since I did not finish reading it. I have rated it 1 star here as this was required of me in order to publish this review.

I came to this book ready to love it as so many of my book-friends do... but sadly I found it patchy and episodic. As is so often the case in contemporary novels, it flits between different times: c.1990s (I'm guessing) when the narrator Yun Lin retires from her position as a judge in Malaysia and returns to Majuba where the eponymous garden lies; 1951 when she first becomes the apprentice to a Japanese master-gardener and works with him on Yugiri; and inset stories of her experiences under Japanese occupation during the war. There are also other inset stories such as that of a professor in the present who was a kamikaze pilot during the war; and the tales of a Boer family now living in Malaysia who hated the English for their activities during the Boer War. It's hard to see how this all comes together and the lack of organic unity is one of the things that disappointed me.

Yun Lin is a hard character to get a handle on: on one hand, she's still known to be bitter about the war, and to hate the Japanese; yet, on the other, she had a Japanese lover in the 1950s. I'd expected the latter story to be more subtle and to interrogate the conflicts between a nation's wartime personality and an individual - but actually this never gets addressed. Yugiri, for sure, is an image of serenity, harmony and beauty in contrast to the atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese army of occupation - but even the garden may have a more sinister purpose...

Add to this the boys-own-adventure strand of a missing war-time treasure, and some rather convenient occurences (the kamikaze pilot who's due to fly to his death... but is prevented by the dropping of the atom bomb) and I frequently felt out of kilter with this book. Even the prose style which others have found beautiful felt rather mundane to me: lots of mentions of clouds, mists, herons and stars but no real substance. Sadly, this is readable but not a success for me.

The Garden Of Evening Mists tells the story of Yun Ling Teoj, a recently retired Malaysian High Court Judge, as she sets her affairs in order in her former home in the Cameron Highlands of Central Malaysia. As she faces up to her recent diagnosis of aphasia and dementia, she entertains a Japanese scholar who wants to study the drawings of Aritomo, the former imperial gardener under whom Ling was apprenticed.

What unfolds is a dense story of intrigue and power games. We see different powers struggle for control in Malaysia - the British, the Japanese, the Chinese - and the compromises that have to be made in order to survive. We see a struggle to create a national cultural identity in a newly independent Malaysia that is a patchwork of peoples. The national struggle is set into relief by the individual situations - Ling, who hates the Japanese because of the way she and her family had been treated in the POW camp, yet having an affair with Aritomo; Magnus, the South African tea magnate who has come through the war unscathed; Aritomo himself, who had left Japan before the war and sat it out in Malaysia.

The writing was great; detailed, descriptive, evocative. Whilst timelines jumped about, the story was coherent and the feeding of information was well timed. The characters felt real, complex. If there is a complaint then it is that the plot becomes just a little bit too intricate at the end. The ending does require some reappraising of the characters and their motives, which is fine, but the basic plot device that emerges is rather contrived. It spoils what would otherwise have been a nicely pitched, well told if unspectacular novel.