Twelve great authors offer their top tips on gardening, from Sylvia Plath’s struggles with autumn bulbs, to Pablo Neruda on pruning roses at the end of a romance. In Brecht’s mini opera, a courageous mother’s fight to protect her tender young potatoes from the army reveals the tragic consequences of a crop being harvested too soon. On Zola’s allotment, a striking miner finds more brutal and perilous than anything he imagined at the coalface. Carver’s anti-hero plants up a neglected hanging basket in a doomed attempt to repair his relationship with his wife. And Brett Easton Ellis’s brand-obsessed hero, drawn into the garden by the promise of carnage, finds in horticulture the perfect outlet for his demons. Inspired, botanically accurate and utterly hilarious, Machiavelli’s Lawn will appeal to green-fingered book lovers everywhere.
