Statues in a Garden

'Isabel Colegate has no rival' The Times

Introduced by Lucy Scholes, a devastating and evocative novel by one of the most important and neglected women writers of the twentieth century

‘I am afraid I have something to tell you. It is that we are all about to be destroyed.’

1914. The old standards are going. There is bitterness in politics, talk of civil war in Ireland.

But all this means little to Cynthia Weston, attractive wife of cabinet member Aylmer Weston, and her nephew by marriage Philip. They are caught up in the charmed, perilous toils of a mutual passion that will destroy all they hold most dear – while the shadow of war lengthens and darkens, ready to swallow their world whole.

A captivating portrait of a lost world, Statues in a Garden is a rediscovered masterpiece by one of the most important and neglected British female writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

‘Just the right mixture of doomed fun, melancholy and faintly lascivious despair’ Observer