Statues in a Garden cover art

Statues in a Garden

 Preview

Get 30 days of Standard free

£5.99/mo after trial. Cancel monthly.
Try for £0.00
More purchase options

Statues in a Garden

By: Isabel Colegate
Narrated by: Kristin Atherton
Try for £0.00

£5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for £12.34

Buy Now for £12.34

Bloomsbury presents Statues in a Garden by Isabel Colegate, read by Kristin Atherton.

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

‘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.©2023 Isabel Colegate (P)2023 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC 20th Century Classics Fiction Historical Fiction World War I Marriage War
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_c

Critic reviews

Colegate’s novels offer readers clear-eyed, illuminating windows onto this now bygone world ... Colegate has no equal ... In shining a light on the past, Colegate also illuminates the present
She should be a household name (Eleanor Catton)
An extraordinary achievement (Frances Wilson)
Stylish, funny, as vivid and brilliant as a painting on glass
Combine the slightly offbeat sensibility of Muriel Spark with the milieu of an Iris Murdoch novel and you’ll have something of an idea about this witty tale
She writes so gracefully and with such skill that her “private fable” acquires a truly fabulous quality
Threads of romance, social comment, country lore and intrigue both above and below stairs are cunningly worked together to create a brilliant tapestry
Remarkable … I can think of no work of fiction that brings [this period] to life so fully and subtly
‘Isabel Colegate is not afraid of ideas nor of using fiction to express them … In this rich and fascinating book, someone is hiding something - possibly everyone is. Time itself obscures the truth. Can the past be known? Or is what we call history the best of recollection, not absolute but consensual, and always subject to interpretation?
All stars
Most relevant
This isn't my first Isabel Colegate. I read The Shooting Party which is a masterpiece and I wished I had simply read this too. But there was an audiobook available so I thought I'd opt for that. The narration frequently ruined the story. Kristin Atherton read the characters quite well but the actual prose in between, the narration, was staccato and read with little nuance or intelligence so much so that she sounded like AI. Disappointing listening experience.

Great book, patchy to irritating narration

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.