We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Garden by Nick Newman, a gothic post-apocalyptic fable about two elderly sisters living in an isolated garden—publishing with G.P. Putnam’s Sons on February 18th.
In a place and time unknown, two elderly sisters live in a walled garden, secluded from the outside world. Evelyn and Lily have only ever known each other. What was before the garden, they have forgotten; what lies beyond it, they do not know. Each day is spent in languid service to their home: tending the bees, planting the crops, and dutifully following the instructions of the almanac written by their mother.
When a nameless boy is found hiding in the boarded house at the center of their isolated grounds, their once-solitary lives are irrevocably disrupted. Who is he? Where did he come from? And most importantly, what does he want?
As suspicions gather and allegiances falter, Evelyn and Lily are forced to confront the dark truths about themselves, the garden, and the world as they’ve known it.
By now there were only four or five places where Lily liked to hide. She was too old and too stiff to get into the tighter spots she had once favored. Evelyn still tried to take her time, though, knowing that her sister would be disappointed if the game was over too quickly.
She set off up the lawn and looked in the toolshed and in the backseat of the ruined car. She looked around the sunroom. She looked in the stand of silver birch trees behind it, Lily’s figurines spinning slowly on their filaments and glistening blackly with the bodies of ants. She looked in the icehouse, even though she knew Lily was as frightened of this as she was of the bees and had never hidden there in her life. It was better to be sure.
She rounded the west wing to the back of the house. Here the garden was wilder. Lily thought of it as her domain, but it was really Evelyn’s, like everything else was, and the wildness only persisted because Evelyn allowed it to. Here there were older and taller trees, and the grass was longer and scattered with wildflowers that even their mother had not found the names for. It was divided by a narrow black lake, the gazebo standing slanted on an island in the middle and connected to the bank by a wooden bridge. Lily once said she’d seen something that looked like an eel in those dark waters, a monster ten feet long with yellow eyes like dinner plates, and Evelyn had never been able to tell if her sister was joking or not.
She skirted the edge of the lake and searched the grotto and the rock garden. Nothing. She searched the pampas grass and found broken stems and feathery heads trodden in the dirt. She hollered her sister’s name and said, “Found you!”—as if by saying it she could make it so—but Lily did not appear.
Evelyn made another lap of the lake, then crossed the bridge to the gazebo and sat on the little bench. The boards were scuffed and dented from Lily’s heels. A few stray sequins scattered there, along with a pile of discarded dresses and leotards and one inexplica le fur coat. The garden felt very quiet. In the silence she caught a glimpse of what it might be like to live there alone, and she shivered in her bones.
Something fluttered in one of the windows of the house and she looked up. She could not be sure where she had seen it. She surveyed the west wing, east wing, attic, chapel, sunroom. The house spanned the horizon like a mountain range, vast and silent. A stately home, Mama had sometimes called it, though there was nothing stately about it these days. There was hardly a square foot of brickwork that was not concealed by ivy and roses and clematis, so that now the house was more a feature of the garden than the other way around. Her mother had always wanted it that way. Would happily have seen it consumed entirely, Evelyn thought.
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She saw it again. Something moving between the branches that covered one of the third-floor windows. A flicker of daylight, off and on again, as though someone were pacing around behind the window frame.
Relief was quickly overlaid with panic. How had Lily even got up there? Everywhere was locked or boarded up and always had been. Their mother forbade them from even thinking about exploring the countless halls and rooms that made up the rest of the house. There were black and poisonous things in there that were best left undisturbed. Admittedly it was only Evelyn who still followed Mama’s instructions to the letter, but even Lily had never shown an inclination to go beyond the bounds of the kitchen.
Evelyn went quickly back to the kitchen, hitching her belt up around her hips. Her ankles rattled and chafed in the Wellington boots. She shooed the chickens on her way and came inside without wiping her feet.
“Lily?” she called.
The house answered with a distant, almost inaudible creak. How could Lily have been so stupid? Had she forgotten how dangerous it was? Ever the wayward little sister. Sometimes Evelyn thought that the handful of years between them, rather than dwindling to insignificance, yawned ever wider as they got older.
“Lily, please! Come out here right now!”
Again, there was no answer. She went into the depths of the kitchen and found the wardrobe squarely in front of the inner door, as it always had been. There was no other way into the rest of the house unless Lily had somehow climbed through a window from the outside. Evelyn stumbled back toward the light, calling her sister’s name, and when she reached the doorstep, Lily leaped out in front of her.
“Boo!” she said.
Evelyn gripped her sister’s shoulders and pulled her into the kitchen. There were leaves in her hair and mud on her knees.
“Where have you been?”
“Ouch! You’re hurting me!”
“You stupid girl!”
“It was just a joke! For goodness’ sake, Evie, what’s got into you?”
“Have you been up in the house?”
“When?”
“Just now.”
“No.”
“You weren’t hiding behind one of the windows?”
“Of course not!”
“Then where were you?”
Lily looked proud of herself. “I moved around. I heard you coming and I moved. I was in the front garden, in the orchard, all this time.”
Evelyn went back to the inner door and listened at the wardrobe but heard nothing.
“Wasn’t that clever of me?” said Lily.
Evelyn ignored her and went back outside, around the green wreck of the car and beyond the chicken coops, and looked up at the window she’d watched from the gazebo. Lily followed a few feet behind, talking all the way.
“What is all this hollering about, Evie?”
“I saw something,” said Evelyn. She pointed at the window. “In there.”
Lily laughed. “And you thought it was me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Who else would it be?”
“Any number of pigeons, for starters.”
“It was bigger than a bird.”
Was it, though? Evelyn struggled to remember exactly what it had looked like, why it had struck such panic in her.
“Some of those pigeons are very fat fellows. They eat more of our vegetables than we do.”
“It moved across like this.” She waved her arms stiffly to demonstrate.
“Must have been a branch. Or the reflection of a branch. That’s the window that’s still got some glass, isn’t it?”
“It was inside, though.”
“Are you sure?”
Evelyn wasn’t. She shook her head. She felt suddenly very tired, as if she and her old shirt were made of the same damp and flimsy material.
“Well,” said Lily. “It wasn’t me.”
A moment passed before Evelyn replied: “I know. Of course it wasn’t.”
“But don’t give me any ideas.”
“What? No, Lily, you can’t!”
“Oh, take a joke, Evie!”
Lily laughed and put a warm hand to Evelyn’s cheek. Evelyn shivered. She looked at the window again. Maybe this was how it started. Maybe she was going to go the way of their mama, seeing and hearing things that weren’t there, until she was no longer in the world at all. Poor Lily would have to care for her, as they’d had to care for their mother. She would have to care for the garden, too. And if she couldn’t? If she wouldn’t?
“Another round, then?” said Lily.
Evelyn looked back at her and blinked. “What?”
“You can hide this time.”
“I don’t want to hide. I want to get back to work.”
“But we barely played at all! And you didn’t even find me.”
“No.”
“Please?”
Evelyn took a deep breath and tried to smile. “You’re a mithering little thing,” she said, fixing a loose strand from Lily’s enormous bun. “And you need a haircut.”
“Never!”
“You’ll have pigeons nesting in there if you’re not careful.”
Lily swatted her hand away. “Stop it. Come on then. One more game.”
“Not today. I’ve got work to do. And you owe me some watering.”
“Well. You’re no fun at all.” Lily removed the paintbrush that she had used to pin her hair, and it tumbled down her back and shoulders. “Show me then.”
They linked arms and walked over the lawn. Evelyn took a last look at the window. There was nothing there, though she wondered, for the first time in an age, what might have been left inside the house when they abandoned it. What might have grown there in their absence.
Excerpted from The Garden, copyright © 2025 by Nick Newman.
