The Gardner

Reviews

“Prue Leith – brilliant cook and businesswoman – is also a highly accomplished novelist.  This is an engaging and well-crafted tale.”
Sue MacGregor

“Prue Leith is a wise, warm, wonderful warm and her writing is exactly like her”
Jilly Cooper

“Prue Leith has chosen excellent ingredients for a story of complicated love.  The heroin’s battle to make a beautiful garden, while her heart becomes engaged with its owner, is described with humour and sparkle, and evocation of the changing seasons is an added delight.”
Angela Huth

“Here is a good romantic tale whose heroine is a divorced mother with three children – a refreshing change from the younger woman so often met within novels.

Lotte Warren is employed by the millionaire owner of a beautiful house surrounded by a derelict park and gardens.  Her brief is to restore the whole estate, but she is up against the owner’s complete ignorance of anything to do with gardens plus a strong inclination to have his own way.  She falls in love with Maddon Park, and the battle between her employer’s attitude and her professional expertise meld into a mutual passion that extends beyond the
place. . .

The setting is one of the strengths of this book.  Prue Leith writes about gardens with the knowledge born of real love for the subject, and this gives the story an extra dimension; so those who enjoy both gardening and romance will find it the ideal novel to take on holiday.”
Elizabeth Jane Howard

‘A gorgeous, completely delightful read – with something serious and fascinating to say about modern families, love, lust – and gardening.  I adored this book.’
Emma Freud  

It’s been a while since celebrity chef Prue Leith crept quietly out of the kitchen and into the study, and her gentle novels are picking up a loyal readership.  The likeable heroine at the heart of Leith's latest is Lotte, whom we meet at a moment of crisis: 15 years of marriage has ended in bitter divorce, inspiring a sudden career switch from high-flying architect to garden history student.  When offered her dream job - head gardener at Heligan-like Maddon Park - she packs up in London and heads for the countryside, her three children in tow.  Of course this is just the beginning, and romatics can rest assured that it's not just flowers that blossom in Lotte's new life.
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