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The Forgotten Garden (Kate Morton, A&U, $32.95 pb, ISBN 9781741149982, July) ***

This is the second novel by the Queensland author of The Shifting Fog. The book opens with a little girl abandoned on a ship to Australia. She is secretly taken in by a childless family and loved as their own. When her origins are revealed on the night of her 21st birthday, Nell O’Connor’s life changes forever. Decades later during the 1970s, she searches for the truth by returning to England, leading her to the windswept Cornish coast, and the strange and beautiful Blackhurst Manor, once owned by an aristocratic family. The story hops between memories of England in the early 1900s and Brisbane between the 1930s and 2005. On Nell’s death, her granddaughter, Cassandra, comes into an unexpected inheritance. Cliff Cottage and its forgotten garden are notorious among the Cornish locals for the secrets they hold-secrets about the doomed family and their ward, a writer of dark Victorian fairytales. It is here that secrets about the family are revealed, and the century-old mystery of a little girl lost is solved. It will be easy to recommend this immediately captivating and atmospheric story to readers of historic fiction, who also enjoy a wellplotted mystery along the way.

Meredith Wright is the owner of Dalton’s Books in Canberra, and has been a bookseller for over 25 years

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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