Joined in 2023 
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It is that rarity, a pictorial delight that in 20 double pages gives more and more of itself each time it's read, and whose silent complexities reveal themselves with continuing pleasure. When I saw that Salley Vickers’ eleventh novel, The Gardener, had been released, I looked out for it on my next library trip. In due time Michael developed his own interests, which ran their courses and gave way to others; but his interest in Helen was constant and increasing throughout. We hear about the girl’s relationships with her mother and father and their relationship with each other.
A ll these details were public property, for Helen was as open as the day, and held that scandals are only increased by hushing then up. Finding it rather a large task, she asks for the help of Murat, an Albanian refugee, who has largely been ‘made to feel out of place amongst the locals’. If all this is beginning to sound like a white woman’s Orientalist fantasy of a handsome stranger from the East who might teach her to love and live again, then it does so by design. They have a natural instinct to follow the good and the positive, even when surrounded by gloom and even despair.
It’s a job too big for one person, so Hassie hires an Albanian migrant who has broken up with his English wife to help her. Hassie herself works as an illustrator on something of a freelance basis; she makes enough to scrape by on ‘a rather dismal series of children’s books’, but has only been able to invest in the house due to an inheritance.
Some of my other books include Palma: An Illustrated History and Deptford Tales: A Strange Poetry Book. N ext morning Mrs Scarsworth left early on her round of commissions, and Helen walked alone to Hagenzeele Third.When my family moved to London from Stoke-on-Trent, we moved into a flat in my godmother’s house in Chiswick and from that time on, because of the source of my name I was known to my godparents as Salley Gardens and to the end of her life my godmother addressed her many letters to me under that name.
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