Sleek, elegant and utterly compelling this little fictional jewel from Ms Colgate centers around the Westons, an upper class British family, and their rather intricate relationships during the early Summer of 1914 as the World silently stands on the brink of some cataclysmic changes. An unflinching look at the last embers of the Edwardian world with perfectly chiseled characters and haunting descriptions of an epoch doomed to vanish & disappear very soon and forever into the fiery maelstrom of WWI.
A beguiling tale of family secrets, rancors and petty shenanigans, and a fascinating look at British politics and society at the beginning of George V's reign. A compelling and gorgeous fictional tapestry reminiscent of E. M Forster that deserves to be discovered and enjoyed without any moderation!

Many thanks to Netgalley and Bloomsbury for this wonderful ARC

I hadn't heard of Isabel Colegate until recently but I'm so glad I found her. I love her writing. It is literary without being elitist and so wonderfully done. A classic.

What a great writer! A sort of comedy of manners with plenty of drama and complex characters.
I liked Orlando King but this book swept me aways and I fell in love with the story, the atmosphere and the characters.
A master storyteller, I hope to read other books by her.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

This is the first Isabel Colegate novel I've read and it has made me keen to read more. Statues in a Garden is a short novel, described as a "fable", which starts just before the first world war, and traces the decline of a landed, upper class family. First published in 1964, it fuses the modernism of its setting (reflected in its the shifting narrative perspectives in particular) with the greater openness of the post-war period quite innovatively, although the references to its historical and socio-political context are a little heavy-handed at times. Witty and often cutting, Colegate balances a sense of loss with a feeling of inevitability ("we are all about to be destroyed"), which is much harder than it sounds. Recommended.

This is a tense drama of manners and society set in the months before the outbreak of World War One. The narrator is one of the party of people she writes about and occasionally she breaks the narrative flow to tell you what happened to the characters involved after the book ends. You only find out who she is at the end of the book.
The use of the narrator is something I struggled with in this book. She recounts episodes she could never have been party to, which undermines her reliability somewhat and I found it a little jarring.
It is a clever, dark drama in which, rather like the war which is looming and which becomes more and more present as the book continues, the tensions of the lies that hold relationships together is brought to breaking point. A short novella which packs a much bigger emotional punch than you would think.

This is very Muriel Spark-esque with lots of chit chat and then impending doom along the way. A real masterpiece of its time. Different feelings towards war, and different reactions within societal life. A great blend of characters with quirks, and strong personalities. Very enjoyable.