In the Garden of the Fugitives by Ceridwen Dovey

Nearly twenty years after Vita broke off contact with Royce, he writes to her, determined to excavate the past. He is older than her, a ghost from her university days, a former benefactor she has tried hard to forget. In his own youth, Royce spent two fateful summers working on a dig in Pompeii with a woman he would later memorialize with a scholarship – the same one that Vita eventually received.

From opposite sides of the world, Royce and Vita enter into an adversarial dance: an attempt to settle old accounts. Profoundly addictive and unsettling, In the Garden of the Fugitives is a thrilling psychological examination of what happens when the lines are blurred between victim and predator, between loyalty and obsession.

PEN SA member Ceridwen Dovey was born in South Africa and grew up between South Africa and Australia. She studied social anthropology at Harvard and New York University before returning to Sydney, where she lives with her husband and two young sons.

Ceridwen’s debut novel, Blood Kin, was published in 15 countries, shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Award, and selected for the US National Book Foundation’s prestigious ‘5 Under 35’ honours list. The Wall Street Journal named her as one of their ‘artists to watch.’ Her second book, Only the Animals, won the inaugural 2014 Readings New Australian Writing Award.

Her new novel, In the Garden of the Fugitives, will be published in 2018, and Writers on Writers: Ceridwen Dovey on J.M. Coetzee will be published in October 2018 as part of Black Inc.’s Writers on Writers series.

She lives in Sydney.