BLOOM BOOK CLUB - 6PM - 7:30PM - Monday 31st March - The Garden Against Time In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing

We're hosting a collaboration book club with Bloom at Novel, we'll be discussing The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing Bloom. Bloom offer safe and welcoming places to reconnect with nature, meet like-minded people, and grow. This event is part of their winter wellbeing offering, you can read more about what they do here.

A copy of the book is included in your purchase, the book is set to be released on 6th March 2025, I will post out copies shortly after that date, or if you opt to collect for free, they will be available to pick up from Novel from that date. 

The event is being held at 6PM - 7:30PM - Monday 31st March.

If this is your first book club and you have any questions about how we operate, check out our BOOK CLUB FAQ.

If you already have the book but would like to book onto our events, please email novelsheffield@gmail.com and I'll send you a link to join if we have any capacity.

We can't wait to see you there!

Kate and Joe x x

THE BLURB:

In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew them into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens.

Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton's Paradise Lost to John Clare's enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.

But the story of the garden doesn't always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It's also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris. New modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change.

The Garden Against Time is a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.