A richly gothic setup…The genius of the novel is the way Beams continually intertwines fictional elements with true-to-life obstetric practices…Make no mistake, this is a serious story, even an angry one… Beams leaves us purposefully, chillingly in doubt. Is the power of the garden real? Is it a delusion brought on by Irene’s fear and isolation?.. Some readers are going to miss getting answers to this novel’s questions, but the ambiguity floating freely through it is perfect for Beams’s intentions.”
—NYTBR
“Few novels of literary fiction are written as well as The Garden, let alone given its sadly relevant retro setting, a 1940s country-estate obstetrical program.”
—The LA Times, 10 Books for April
“A teeming gothic.”
—Vanity Fair
"Luminous and disturbing...While this book is well-grounded in its historical setting, the way the book explores medical and societal control over women’s bodies feels incredibly contemporary."
—CrimeReads
“Beams' second outing is a taut, tense, absorbing Gothic tale that deftly explores the complexity of women's inner lives.”
—Booklist (Starred Review)
"Beams’ writing sets her apart, shimmering against the dark subject matter...Like an overgrown garden—untamable, lush, and wild in ways lovely and terrifying."
—Kirkus (Starred 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
“THE GARDEN is a shimmering, sinister jewel of a novel, with an aching, Shirley Jackson like heart. Highly recommended!"
—Dan Chaon, author of Sleepwalk
“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
“Deliciously eerie and brilliantly written, Beams explores motherhood and gestation in a way that feels new and trailblazing, but that will also ring true to the lived experience of every woman who has ever been pregnant. A shimmering, strange, important novel— I couldn’t put it down.”
—Rufi Thorpe, author of The Knockout Queen
“Clare Beams casts an intoxicating spell with The Garden, a gothic tale about nature’s dark whims and the unknowable chaos of matrescence. Prepare to be haunted.”
—Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch
"The Garden is a novel to devour whole. It is a page-turner, a puzzle, an assembly of piercing insights into womanhood, ambition, and autonomy, in language as bewitching as it is exact."
—Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning
“THE GARDEN's gender politics, barbed wit, moral complexity, and genuine sense of unease recalls the best of Shirley Jackson's work…This swirling marvel of a novel cements Clare Beams as a read-everything-she-ever-writes writer."
—Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts
★ 2024-01-20
In 1948 Massachusetts, a young wife enters a mysterious residential program to help her carry a pregnancy to term.
Having suffered five miscarriages, Irene Willard arrives at an estate in the Berkshires that serves as a treatment facility for pregnant women with similar histories. High-spirited and impetuous, Irene isn’t thrilled to be so tightly monitored by the married doctors who run the program, but Irene’s husband, shaken by his wartime service, desperately wants children. Because of him, Irene endures calisthenics and communal gardening, hormone shots and psychotherapy. Most acutely, she endures Dr. Bishop, the woman who spearheads the program with steely ambition. When Irene discovers an untended walled garden on the back of the property, she realizes it may be the source of the house’s unsettling atmosphere, with ramifications for both Irene and Dr. Bishop that are beyond either of their comprehensions. In many ways, this novel is sister to Beams’ debut novel, The Illness Lesson (2020); both feature a women-centered community, dubious health treatments, and animal omens. But here Beams leans into horror influences—The Haunting of Hill House, Rosemary’s Baby, plant horror, even Stephen King—and into the tropes of the maternal gothic. (“She’d had no idea love could swirl with horror this way,” Beams writes of Irene.) While many authors have explored the way the pregnant body is a haunted body, Beams’ writing sets her apart, shimmering against the dark subject matter. She also navigates a minefield, as Irene’s treatment is based on a synthetic hormone used in the 1940s that caused both birth defects and health risks for the mother; where a lesser writer might have fallen back on ableist tropes of “monstrous” children, Beams treats her subject with a careful moral imagination.
Like an overgrown garden—untamable, lush, and wild in ways lovely and terrifying.
