Walking the Maze

A wonderfully intense novel which takes imagination as its subject and manages, through Annice, a complex shifting between the present and the world within a painting. It is marvellously rich, made more complex by being interwoven into a production of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream . The world within the painting is a haunting creation (or recreation) of a family’s history, deeply bound up with the garden and the plants within it. The ‘painting’ world has the intense feel of Tom’s Midnight Garden , of time passing and loss (I cannot think of another book which has come quite so close to the sense of being in that garden). It takes complete hold of the reader and moves with accelerating speed through its complex imaginings to a dramatic conclusion. What a marvellous demonstration of what books can do.