Cover art by Catharina Suleiman
Forthcoming from Doubleday April 9, 2024
New York Times Editors’ Choice
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“The genius of the novel is the way Beams continually intertwines fictional elements with true-to-life obstetric practices… Just as the pregnant women who were prescribed DES endured decades of fear and guilt about how the drug’s harms would manifest in their children, the patients in The Garden learn there is nothing they can do to take the doubt away. There is no monster for them to slay, or be defeated by. There is no catharsis. There is only one woman at a time, trying to navigate a world where, when it comes to her child’s welfare, she can never be completely at ease.”
—New York Times Book Review
“No one writes feminist historical fiction like Clare Beams. With her singular lyricism, elegance, and candor, The Garden powerfully illuminates what is, for many women, a private and isolating grief. Ingeniously using elements of the gothic and weaving in today’s most pressing questions about female bodily autonomy, Beams captures the magic, strangeness, terror, and all-consuming pressure of pregnancy, as well as the desperate desire for certainty and the abiding hope. I’m in awe of this book.”
—Jessamine Chan, author of The School for Good Mothers
“The Garden renders beautifully the uncanny, haunted space that pregnancy both occupies and creates. Beams’s glancing, needle-prick prose reminds me of Shirley Jackson’s work in its ability to conjure up women–their histories, their fears, the complexity of their desires, and their power. I loved this novel.”
—Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble
“Clare Beams is a master of fiction…Born in the literary legacy of Angela Carter and Stephen King, THE GARDEN is, like every child, utterly itself in the end—miraculous and beautiful and strange.”
—Julia Phillips, author of Disappearing Earth
The discovery of a secret garden with unknown powers fuels this page-turning and psychologically thrilling tale of women yearning to become mothers and the ways the female body has always been policed and manipulated, from the award-winning author of The Illness Lesson (“A masterpiece” – Elizabeth Gilbert)
In 1948, Irene Willard, who’s had five previous miscarriages in a quest to give her beloved husband the child he desperately desires and is now pregnant again, comes to an isolated house-cum-hospital in the Berkshires, run by a husband-and-wife team of doctors who are pioneering a cure for her condition. Warily, she enlists herself in the efforts of the Doctors Hall to “rectify the maternal environment,” both physical and psychological. In the meantime, she also discovers a long-forgotten walled garden on the spacious grounds, a place imbued with its own powers and pulls. As the doctors’ plans begin to crumble, Irene and her fellow patients make a desperate bid to harness the power of the garden for themselves—and must face the incalculable risks associated with such incalculable rewards.
With shades of Shirley Jackson and Rosemary’s Baby, The Garden delves into the territory of motherhood, childbirth, the mysteries of the female body, and the ways it has always been controlled and corralled.