The Garden by Nick Newman

First published in Great Britain in 2025; published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on February 18, 2025

Global warming stories dominate the current crop of post-apocalyptic novels, perhaps because the harm that will inevitably result from climate change is obvious to all but the willfully blind. The Garden, however, is more a novel of domestic drama than one of survivors struggling with the consequences of an overheated planet.

Evelyn and Lily are sisters.  For many years, they have lived together in the kitchen of their family home. Apart from the kitchen, boards have been nailed over all the windows and doors. The sisters spend their days alone, tending a large garden and harvesting honey from beehives. Occasionally they play a game of hide-and-seek. They don’t recall how old they are, but they are feeling the effects of aging. They take direction — when to prune the trees, when to plant and harvest — from an almanac compiled by their mother. The sisters quarrel and bicker but they’ve been doing that their entire lives. They particularly argue about whether they have wasted their lives following their mother’s instructions.

The backstory reveals something of their history. At some point in the past, fierce storms required them to dig out and replant their garden. There were once several people living on the estate, apparently operating as a co-op, but they all left, perhaps at their mother’s insistence. Their mother apparently went mad before she died. Their father abandoned them, or so their mother told them. Their mother boarded up the rest of the house and forbade the sisters from entering it because it is filled with dangerous things — men’s things. Their mother had a bug up her bum about men. The sisters only knew one man (their father), and their mother viewed him as an exemplar of poor male behavior.

A wall around the estate needs repair. The sisters know nothing of the outside world because their mother told them that they shouldn’t look over the wall. “The land outside was so dry and so bright it could blind you at a glance, Mama had said.” The sisters are certain that danger lurks inside their boarded house and outside the walls of their estate. “Their mother forbade them from even thinking about exploring the countless halls and rooms that made up the rest of the house.” Nick Newman eventually supplies a plausible explanation for their demented mother’s instructions.

The sisters finally meet a male when a boy of indeterminate age makes his way over a collapsed section of the wall. The sisters debate whether to kill him (he’s emaciated and would be easy prey), but Evelyn feeds him, thinking they need an able-bodied worker now that their aging bodies are less adept at performing chores. Lily eventually takes a shine to him, leading to another round of quarrels and setting up the novel’s defining conflict.

The story is slow-moving and only sporadically interesting. It fails to build tension and the sudden arrival of tense moments is insufficient to give the story the weight Newman must have intended. The apocalyptic background is underdeveloped, I suppose because it is only a means of setting up the odd relationship between the sisters. The story contains only one surprise, but it’s a good one. Another unexpected twist in the story is less surprising but sets up a final confrontation between the boy and the sisters.

Nick Newman’s prose is stylish. I can’t say the story seemed plausible. Nor can I say that I cared much about the sisters, both of whom seem intolerable, although I suppose post-apocalyptic isolation would not be a formula for a winning personality. Still, Newman didn’t make me warm up to the sisters. The boy is a more sympathetic character but he’s more an empty vessel than a clearly defined character. In its effort to give literary heft to post-apocalyptic fiction, The Garden is a cut above the dreck that permeates the genre but it never gives the reader a reason to care about its characters.

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