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The Booth Museum in Brighton, East Sussex is a testimony to one man’s passion for collecting. Languishing among the corridors of stuffed birdlife are two jars containing pickled bean embryos and unidentified corms. It’s hard to imagine anything more beautiful.

The great hills of the South Country

They stand along the sea;

And it’s there walking in the high woods

 That I could wish to be,

 And the men that were boys when I was a boy

Walking along with me.

 

I never get between the pines

But I smell the Sussex air;

Nor I never come on a belt of sand

But my home is there.

And along the sky the line of the Downs

So noble and so bare.

Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953)

 

 

The streets of Brighton are dotted with curiosities and lovingly clipped entrances.

 

I am delighted to write that on Sunday 28th April my second novel  The Insistent Garden became the recipient of the Margaret Laurence Fiction Award in Winnipeg, Canada.

‘Rosie Chard’s second novel is full of tension and mystery as it tells the story of a shy young woman slowly exploring the secrets of her reclusive family. Chard recreates the feel of the English Midlands in 1969 with a surprising and compelling plot, characters who are off-kilter but believable, and a villain you feel justified in hating.’

Thomas Trofimuk. (Jury member)

 

 

Rousham, Oxfordshire.

 

 

 

The woods at Wakehurst Place were overwhelmingly lovely today.

 

 

A vegetable garden in the beginning

looks so promising and then after all

little by little it grows nothing but

vegetables, nothing, nothing but

vegetables. 

Gertrude Stein.

I am delighted to report that The Insistent Garden has been nominated for the Margaret Laurence Fiction award in Canada.

The 2013 Manitoba Book Awards take place on Sunday April 27, 2014 at the West End Cultural Centre. Winnipeg, Manitoba.  Doors open at 6:30 pm and the ceremonies begin at 7:00 pm. Admission is free.

 

‘Shadows are silent. Shadows fall on the ground, yet this shadow – did I imagine it? – didn’t quite fall; it came up behind me and hovered in the air.’

The Insistent Garden.