Happy Tuesday my lovely readers! Who’s enjoying the sunshine, I am I live for these days. The heat not so much though. Today I posting a delayed tour stop for a beautifully looking fantasy that is one of my anticipated reads this season. It’s The Winter Garden by Alexandra Bell. When you see the cover you will be starstruck, it’s honestly stunning. Alex Bell has written numerous YA which I’ve really enjoyed in the past and I can’t wait to see what this new adult fantasy will take her. If your looking for a book this Winter I think this is the one to pick up. Plus it’s giving me Winternight trilogy vibes right there.
With life getting in the way these days, reading has taken a backseat so I am unable to share my review so instead I have an extract that I hope will tease you and hook you into the book. The Winter Garden is now available to buy, use the links below to grab your copy. Waterstones do a gorgeous special stencilled edition too. 😍 But before that here is a little bit more about the book.
The Winter Garden by Alex Bell Published by Del Rey on September 2, 2021
Genres: Fantasy, Fantasy & Magic
Amazon | Book Depository | Waterstones
Goodreads
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Welcome to the Winter Garden. Open only at 13 o'clock.
You are invited to enter an unusual competition.
I am looking for the most magical, spectacular, remarkable pleasure garden this world has to offer.
On the night her mother dies, 8-year-old Beatrice receives an invitation to the mysterious Winter Garden. A place of wonder and magic, filled with all manner of strange and spectacular flora and fauna, the garden is her solace every night for seven days. But when the garden disappears, and no one believes her story, Beatrice is left to wonder if it were truly real.
Eighteen years later, on the eve of her wedding to a man her late father approved of but she does not love, Beatrice makes the decision to throw off the expectations of Victorian English society and search for the garden. But when both she and her closest friend, Rosa, receive invitations to compete to create spectacular pleasure gardens - with the prize being one wish from the last of the Winter Garden's magic - she realises she may be closer to finding it than she ever imagined.
Now all she has to do is win.
An Extract
They say gardens are good for the soul, and the magical Winter Garden most of all. You’ll never find it in one place for long. It goes where it is needed, appearing from nothing and vanishing just as quickly. Some days you might spot it high in the mountains of Nepal; on others it will materialise in the mists of Mongolia. During the summer it may choose to settle for a spell in the rolling green fields of England, or shrink down for the winter to squeeze into the inside of a teacup. The garden is a place of wonder and magic in a world that often has so little of both. Full of strange birds and impossible flowers, mushrooms that dance with you and trees that whisper secrets, frog music and frosted fairies in their finest fur coats.
Nobody knows how it came to be – only that it belongs to the elusive Spider Queen, about whom almost as little is known as about the garden itself. She decides where the garden should go and who should be invited to see
Chapter 1
By all accounts she has an affinity for the lost and the lonely, the misfits and the misunderstood, the broken and the bereft, the heartsore and the hurting. Certainly those who claim to have seen the garden say that it appeared to them in their darkest, bleakest moments, when they were most in need of its soft lights and scented delights, its compassion and kindness for all lost souls. Beatrice Anne Sitwell was eight years old the first time she discovered the garden. Or, more accurately, when it discovered her. It was already a day to remember, because it was the day her mother died.
‘Do you understand what I’m telling you, Beatrice?’ her father had said that morning in the parlour. The circles beneath his eyes looked like bruises, the smallest sound made him wince, as if he were the one who was ill, and he gazed through her with raw, unseeing eyes. ‘Your mother is at the end,’ he went on. ‘She wishes to see you.To say goodbye.’ Beatrice did not understand, not truly, but thanks to her recent operation, she could not utter a word and so the questions piled up in a smouldering heap at the end of her useless tongue. The end of what? She wished she could simply remain in the parlour, playing with her mother’s key collection. Beatrice loved the keys. Some were larger than the palm of her hand, whilst others were tiny enough to open a fairy door. They were made of brass, and silver, and iron, and gold. Her mother had said she liked to imagine there was a story that went with each key, and that the key itself still knew what that was, even if everyone else had long since forgotten.
Doesn’t it sound amazing! I can’t wait to read it. Thank you to Del Rey for sending me a copy.
