The redemptive journey of a young woman unsure of her engagement, who revisits in memory the events of one scorching childhood summer when her beautiful yet troubled mother spirits her away from her home to an Indian village untouched by time, where she discovers in the jungle behind her ancestral house a spellbinding garden that harbors a terrifying secret.
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The redemptive journey of a young woman unsure of her engagement, who revisits in memory the events of one scorching childhood summer when her beautiful yet troubled mother spirits her away from her home to an Indian village untouched by time, where she discovers in the jungle behind her ancestral house a spellbinding garden that harbors a terrifying secret.
Amazon.com Exclusive Essay from Kamala Nair
The idea for The Girl in the Garden grew out of a single image I saw in a dream. It happened one night during a trip to Kerala, India, in the winter of 2004.
We were staying in the rambling farmhouse where my father grew up, a place I had often visited as a child. Growing up, The Secret Garden was one of my favorite novels, and whenever I came here, I felt like Mary at Misselthwaite Manor, stepping into a culturally confusing world full of strange new discoveries. The verdant jungles, wild and untended, were the perfect place to uncover buried secrets.
One evening after sunset, a group of my relatives headed to the village temple. The temple idols were bathed in the glow of flickering torches, while bells rang and sticks of incense burned. One of my cousins grabbed my hand, pulling me away from the swarm of worshippers and guiding me toward the remnants of a stone wall, with a vast green field just beyond, and an ancient-looking well at its center.
"People say that well is haunted by a yekshi," whispered my cousin with a smirk, "A ghost." She was in her late teens, too old to believe in such things, as was I, and while I knew that she was pointing it out more as a curiosity than as something to be feared, the moment was nonetheless arresting.
I lay in bed that night, thinking about the field and the well, and as I drifted into sleep, a tree with branches covered in red flowers entered the picture. I dreamed of two little girls huddling under the tree and the petals of the flowers showering down around them. When I awoke, I could not let go of that image, so I began to think about who those little girls were and why they were huddled under the tree.
The stirrings of a story growing in my mind caused me to see India in a new way. The village, the paddy fields, the Ayurvedic hospital that my grandfather, had founded--they all became characters, as well as the house.
My grandmother had recently passed away, and this was the first time we had returned without her. Her absence was palpable. The house seemed to have degenerated.
I never had the chance to meet my grandfather, who died when I was ten days old, but from stories I knew that he was a hero to his children and a man with enormous compassion for his patients. My grandmother had been the purest, most loving woman I had ever met. In their passing, something incalculably precious was lost--a sense of family history that having grown up thousands of miles away, I only rarely felt when I had wandered as a child through those old rooms. The house had fallen, not, like Ashoka, as a result of poisonous secrets, but from the inevitable passage of time.
Thus began Rakhee’s journey.
Review
"A daring fairy tale of a story, Nair's first novel audaciously tackles issues ranging from puberty to friendship to abuse, providing plenty of adventure as well." --Booklist
"The unexpected twists and dark secrets lurking make it difficult for readers to put this engrossing story down. A strong cast of well-developed characters will further capture their emotions. Fans of The Secret Garden (the author was inspired by this childhood classic) as well as lovers of family dramas and Indian fiction will find a new favorite in Nair." --Library Journal
"Lush and mysterious, The Girl in the Garden casts its spell from the first page. Kamala Nair weaves an intricate tale of family bonds, buried secrets, and the pain that comes when we must leave the innocence of childhood behind. This is a deeply satisfying novel." --Kelly O'Conner McNees, author of The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott
"Kamala Nair has crafted an evocative, passionate, tragic novel about love, loss and the terrible cost of family secrets. An impressive debut." --Thrity Umrigar, bestselling author of The Space Between Us
"The unexpected twists and dark secrets lurking make it difficult for readers to put this engrossing story down. A strong cast of well-developed characters will further capture their emotions. Fans of The Secret Garden (the author was inspired by this childhood classic) as well as lovers of family dramas and Indian fiction will find a new favorite in Nair." --Library Journal
"Lush and mysterious, The Girl in the Garden casts its spell from the first page. Kamala Nair weaves an intricate tale of family bonds, buried secrets, and the pain that comes when we must leave the innocence of childhood behind. This is a deeply satisfying novel." --Kelly O'Conner McNees, author of The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott
"Kamala Nair has crafted an evocative, passionate, tragic novel about love, loss and the terrible cost of family secrets. An impressive debut." --Thrity Umrigar, bestselling author of The Space Between Us
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More About the Author
Kamala Nair was born in London and grew up in the United States. A graduate of Wellesley College, she studied literature at Oxford University and received an M.Phil in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin in 2005. She currently lives in New York City, where she has worked at ELLE DECOR.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very satisfying, and a page-turner,
This review is from: The Girl in the Garden (Hardcover)
I started this book just before bed, intending to only read for about 20 minutes - instead I stayed up all night reading because I could not wait until the next day to find out what happened. It is dark, intriguing, adventurous and relatable to all of us who have experienced that transition between childhood and adulthood in which it comes as a bit of a shock that your parents and extended family have pasts.I don't read fiction unless it is a great story that keeps me interested. This definitely did that! A perfect beach/summertime read.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Try and put it down. I dare you.,
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This review is from: The Girl in the Garden (Hardcover)
I started The Girl in the Garden on a transatlantic flight. I had to change planes in London and I was irritated at being interrupted in the middle of the story, just as some of the intriguing questions and mysteries of The Girl in the Garden were making themselves known.I loved the voice of young Rakhee, an innocent, cloistered girl who was exposed to a brand new world as a young woman and discovers the secrets of her family's past that will change her life forever. I loved the world Kamala Nair weaved, this Wonderland, where I, like Rakhee, was spirited away during the hours that I devoured this story. It was such a difficult story to read, because I knew I was closer to the end with each page that I turned. The descriptions depicted, the stresses of a young child learning the dark secrets of her family that have been hidden from her, these were all so magical, yet so very tangibly created. The Girl in the Garden is perfect for that long flight, that incessantly rainy afternoon or simply when you want to get lost in a beautifully written book that will spirit you away. Turn your phone off and disable your doorbell, because nothing can tear you away from The Girl in the Garden.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gripping mystery about love and family that will never let you go,
This review is from: The Girl in the Garden (Hardcover)
As other reviewers have noted, it is impossible to turn away from this story once begun, so be forewarned and prepared to read it in one sitting. Though this is only to feel the loneliness of missing a great friend, and to want to begin all over again. Unlike many big stories that try the reader's patience with unnecessary details, Nair's novel efficiently contains a multi-generational family saga, loves, deaths, secrets, ruin, and rebirth. We feel the thrill (and terror) of the heroine's explorations in a new world, of her discovery of her mother's devastating deception, and finally of her catharsis in learning to let judgment evolve into compassion and a return to the people and places that almost destroyed her family.The originality and beauty of The Girl in the Garden, its wonderful strangeness, and its lifelong friendship with the reader, lie in the heroine's narrative deftness in subtly yet wholly altering the reader's expectations and perceptions of the two worlds of the novel. Nair sharply contrasts the whited sepulcher of Plainfield, in a Midwest as cold and colorless and alienating as its name, with Malanad, a South Indian village as warm and riotously hued and vital as the Indian myths that Rakhee's cousins, her first real friends--particularly the bright, bold, brilliant Krishna--enact for their shy American visitor. These stories come to signify the sheer force of living that Rakhee has been denied, and has begun to deny herself, as the neglected child of parents imprisoned within their own tragic pasts. They revive her dormant sense of self, and with keen psychological insight into how children perceive their world, Nair shows the therapeutic power of storytelling in helping Rakhee to make sense of the confusing behavior of her mother, of her mother's family, and finally of the devastating secret they have conspired to conceal since before she was born. Her childhood chronicle is a tone poem startling for its crescendoes of titanic discoveries and confrontations, yet written largely from the quiet wonder of a child's daily explorations and introspections in deciphering, again, the strangeness of growing into oneself. The magic moment, when the novel ceased to be a compelling mystery about Rakhee's summer journey to India to discover the source of her mother's unhappiness, and became a timeless story that has been told and will always be told, simple yet coiled in complexities vast and deep, came over me as Rakhee observes the incandescent coastline of Kerala from her airplane window. She is awed before so much that is beautiful and beyond her comprehension. Her world, our world, begins to expand to admit the history of a family that stalks softly, under the guise of this impossible beauty, as they unsheath the brutality that will destroy all their old complacencies and lies, making space, finally and gently, for resilience and reconstruction, grace and forgiveness. Nair's pacing has the courage to avoid easy moderation and formulaic adjustment in her narrative progress, and instead reflects the disproportions of life. Her metronome marks the development of dread, and so the breakdown of the family, as it often happens in real life, with a long peace disrupted by dislocations that are only unwieldy if one hasn't been paying attention. Catastrophe develops gradually, in this case over the course of generations, until suddenly dysfunctions cease to be suppressed and the old order, its foundations increasingly unstable, collapses before one last provocation. Yes, sudden conjunctions of extreme behavior might have been soap operatic were they not preceded by carefully chosen causes and motivations that exist not for sensationalism or excitement but to show how and why things falls apart. To read The Girl in the Garden as only a mystery is to miss the purpose of its creation. Nair seeks to explain the decline and the regeneration of a family, of survival, yes, but not mere survival, as much as the long, painful process of maturity that comes only as Rakhee, and those she loves, pass through inordinate pain to learn to love without the shame and misplaced pride that nearly laid a waste to the potential of so many unable to see the evil of their good intentions. Nair's purpose, then, is moral, to reveal, without equivocation, the breaking and making of her characters, of ourselves, as we seek the knowledge of our confusing hearts, and that elusive yet finally realized goal of how to live good lives.
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