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The collection is absolutely thrilling--boundless and strange. The sentences radiate creative power. Funny and angry. This kind of thing would never be published today. They are 'doing it wrong.' They would need to be tamed, sanded down--in them I see an antidote to the commercialisation of imagination and a way forward.

I read this 30 years ago as a younger woman and as a coming of age story I saw in it a kind of terrible mirror. In the parlance of our times 'I felt seen'. This book is a vortex swirling around a single moment: a girl gets into a strangers car. Everything leading up to that moment and coming after circles it in the narrative, switching point of view from first to third and back. The subject is an object and back to a subject. Rereading this book I now see that it's a document of colonialism and patriarchy and the relationship between the two. A formative text for me, and a master work of autofiction.

Rereading this yet again, this time thinking most about setting, particularly Orkney.

This (unlikeable) protagonist of this book touts cliches as life lessons including quoting Forest Gump. Just no.

What begins as a book about an idyllic cottage garden quickly deepens into a complex narrative about healing the ancestral trauma of slavery and ongoing institutional racism while surviving a pandemic. I particularly appreciated Farrell’s discoveries regarding the ‘invasive’ plants and common English garden plants that were actually colonial imports. Farrell’s lyrical exploration of being othered by the idea of ‘Englishness’ is something I understood, also being an immigrant, though I am white and this has saved me from the worst aspects of British xenophobia. This is also a book for anyone who is breaking ground—in a country garden—or on a patio or sterile patch of grass as I am now doing. An inspiring meditation on gardening, an important work of anti-colonial literature, and sublime piece of nature writing