Spellbinding things happen when a stranger enters ‘The Garden’

A garden. Is there a more potent image, carrying as it does such hefty biblical weight?

Certainly British writer Nick Newman would have been hard-pressed to keep the implications out of mind as he put fingers to keyboard to create “The Garden.” Like the one populated by Adam and Eve, two people reside in Newman’s version: sisters Evelyn (called Evie) and Lily. They are older, perhaps quite a bit, and have been living within the walls of their garden for as long as they can remember.

They haven’t always lived there alone, though. Once upon a time (the novel often feels like a dark fairy tale) they lived in the property’s big, now-boarded-up house with their mother and father. The girls remember portraits on the walls, cocktail parties, dance lessons and music. Eventually, that life ended and another began, one that required all of them and whoever remained with the family to work in the garden to survive. Then only the family was left. Then the sisters and their mother, and then just the sisters.

Their garden is not part of creation but the result of something cataclysmic. “‘There is no one left …' [Evie] began, and Lily pressed herself a little closer against her sister’s side.”

If the beginning of that quotation is recognizable, it’s because it’s the first chapter’s title of that children’s literature classic, “The Secret Garden,” the other garden Newman references. And, like in “The Secret Garden,” a mysterious boy will unexpectedly appear, complicating life within the walls of Evie and Lily’s garden.

Newman’s novel might just as well have been called “The Secret Garden,” too, or maybe “The Secrets in the Secret Garden.” Evie and Lily take great pains to keep themselves off the outside world’s radar for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, but they also keep secrets from each other — mostly Evie from Lily in a misguided attempt to protect her sister.

When the boy shows up, Evie and Lily discover the precarious balance they’ve maintained, and the scaffolding of what they’ve told themselves to survive begins to come apart.

How they see themselves slowly unravels as Newman fills in their back story, carefully sowing seeds of information. Just when you think you understand what has happened or will, another part of the picture blooms, rather like figuring out the identity of a flower you didn’t realize you planted. The process is spellbinding.

Newman is particularly adept at sustaining a child’s-eye view of events. Evie and Lily may be adults (their ages are a mystery), but they have grown up in the garden. They know nothing else, other than what their mother told them about the outside world and the almanac she created to guide them about what to plant and when.

But then “Nick Newman” knows a thing or two about that perspective. That is the pen name of Nicholas Bowling, the author of several children’s novels, including “Witchborn” and “In the Shadow of Heroes.” “The Garden” is his foray into the adult realm, and what a welcome work it is.

Maren Longbella is a multiplatform editor for the Minnesota Star Tribune.

The Garden

By: Nick Newman.

Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 304 pages, $29.