Yun Ling has survived a Japanese internment camp and wants to create a garden in memory of her sister who died. She searches out the former gardener of the Emperor, now living in the Malay highlands, and becomes his apprentice. In startlingly lovely prose, we follow their developing relationship - gardening becomes memory and forgetting, pain and forgiveness - against the violent backdrop of civil war. Unnecessary denouements at the end? Perhaps, but haunting, beautiful, absorbing.
(Annabel Bedini - bwl 69 Summer 2013 ) |