Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. She's the author of seven books, including The Lonely City, Everybody and Funny Weather. Her first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the 2019 James Tait Memorial Prize. Her work has been translated into twenty-two languages and in 2018 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction.
What a wonderful book this is. I loved the enchanting and beautifully written story but also the fascinating and thoughtful excursions along the way -- Nigel Slater No one writes with more energy and ecstasy than Olivia Laing. This book is what we need right now: paradise, regained -- Philip Hoare Olivia Laing is my favourite non-fiction writer, and it is a joy to encounter her brilliant mind again in The Garden Against Time. It is a magisterial work, and the exacting sensuality of her garden writing is pure pleasure, delight, surprise. It is a triumph, from a writer at the height of her powers -- Francesca Segal Olivia Laing has written a book about making her garden, which is by turns lyrical, consoling, disturbing and inspiring. It’s a book for thinking gardeners everywhere -- Mary Keen Powerful, reflective and captivating to read - I loved it. -- Fergus Garrett A sharp and enthralling memoir of the garden’s contradiction: dream and reality, life and death, the fascination of cultivation and the political horrors that it can disguise -- Neil Tennant The most magical writing, intimate, insightful, learned and brilliant. -- Jeremy Lee, restaurateur and author of <i> Cooking: Simply and Well, for One or Many <i> An extraordinary and important work. I felt doubly alive after reading it. The book is an inspiration. -- Celia Paul, author of <i> Self-Portrait <i> Quite literally unputdownable. It is astonishing, funny, beautiful, wise, charming and truthful. -- Jinny Blom, author of <i> What Makes a Garden <i> This book is as imaginatively structured and full of beauties and surprises as the garden whose creation it documents. -- Lucy Hughes-Hallett, author of <i> The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War <i> Laing probes important questions about land ownership and exclusion and the human drive to create paradise on earth. All the while, her elegant prose bewitches and beguiles. A truly wonderful read. -- Sue Stuart-Smith, author of <i> The Well Gardened Mind <i> Olivia Laing’s exploration of cultivation and dispossession is both arresting and irresistibly lyrical, confidently yet modestly drawn from a life entwined with plants and a gift for compelling biography. A timely and necessary reappraisal of the garden and its boundaries. -- Matt Collins, Head Gardener at the Garden Museum