Behind a villa in the heart of Tuscany lies a Renaissance garden of enchanting beauty. .....

Dieses Buch ist unterwegs zu flatterbuch, freut sich auf ein neues Regal und einen Eintrag im Gästebuch. Gutes Crossing!

Vielen Dank auch für dieses Buch. Journaleinträge folgen.

Es geht jetzt an eine (noch)nicht bookcrossende Freundin.

Beuteschema getroffen. Mehrfach!

Mitgenommen beim heutigen MeetUp in der "Auszeit am See" zu Elmshorn.

Took it from yet another meetup in & around Hamburg.

Picked up at yesterday's meetup at Smögen.

Took mee a while to get into the story but in the end it was quite captivating.

Will be taken to the meetup.

‘Full of mystery and menace’ says The Times on the cover. Excellent I think it could make a grand inclusion in a BCUK Not-So-Secret-Halloween/Celebrating Autumn BC parcel depending who I get paired with!

I picked up The Savage Garden on Saturday at a meeting we Edinburgh BookCrossers were holding for two visiting German BookCrossers Dschinny & Nordkind. What an enjoyable meeting, even if I couldn’t easily hear all the conversation with the noisy background of a busy bar. Many thanks for your company and this book Dschinny!

I’m adding book details as I use BookCrossing as a book log…

From fantasticfiction.com A beautiful Tuscan villa, a mysterious garden, two hidden murders - one from the 16th century, one from the twentieth - and a family driven by dark secrets, combine in this evocative, intriguing mystery set in post-War Italy.

In 1958, Adam Strickland, a young Cambridge scholar, travels to the Villa Docci in Tuscany to study a sixteenth-century garden. Designed and laid out by a grieving husband to the memory of his dead wife, it is a mysterious world of statues, grottoes, meandering rills and classical inscriptions. But tragedy has hit the Docci family more recently. The German occupation during World War 2 had a devastating impact on them, and the tensions between collaborators and partisans were played out within their own tight circle.

Adam is fascinated by the Doccis and increasingly aware that there are dangerous secrets hidden within the family domain. The garden itself starts to exercise a powerful influence over his imagination, its iconography seeming to point to some deeper, darker truth than was first apparent. And what really lay behind a killing at the villa towards the end of the war? Past and present, love and intrigue, intertwine in an evocative mystery which vividly captures the experience of an innocent abroad in the uncertain world of post-War Italy.
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By golly, what a cracking read!!! I was almost gasping when I finished this …

An omnipresent note of gloom is stealthily achieved and kept up throughout the novel and spreads out from Adams first walk into the Memorial garden at Villa Docci. Adam Strickland a Cambridge art history student visiting an Italy still unsettled some 13 years after the end of WWII finds himself ultimately shaken out of his habitual indolence when he becomes unexpectedly gripped by the mysteries he uncovers while researching his thesis project, the curiously noteworthy design of a Renaissance garden.

The trickiness of the plotting is revealed here and there the closer one gets to the books end and by that time the mysteries had multiplied till a stubborn Adam was grimly determined to expose someone he is convinced has committed murder. But has Adam miraculously conjured up a tale that may solve one ancient mystery only to be defeated by a more modern one? Over a period of a few weeks Adam meets new friends, reluctantly falls in love, forges new relationships with his family and places his life in the gravest danger he has ever faced.

On conclusion this reminded me of Robert Goddard’s novels with their jaw dropping concluding twists though here there is more of a rounded contribution from other players which adds a satisfying depth and happily we are not left with a narrator who has been permanently blasted by the ruination of former dreams.

An incidental joy was reading the descriptions of Italian cities, towns and buildings I have visited and the glories of Italian food I have relished. San Miniato al Monte in Florence, a Romanesque church with its memorable interior apparently little changed since building started in 1013; Piazza del Campo in Siena, the stunning fan shaped city ‘square’; the town of San Gimignano with its many towers which create its magnificent skyline and it’s local vineyards which produce its famous white wine, Vernaccia di San Gimignano. All treasured memories!

I am whisking this book off to a Book Swap/BookCrossing meeting at Joseph Pearces on Thu 6th October, if not picked up I may leave it on the book shelves there.

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Picked up at meetup

Released in the pub