Blog tour: The Hollow Garden by Natalie Grace Lewis

This post is part of a blog tour organised by Random Things Blog Tours. I received a free copy of the book in return for an honest review.

‘Following her aunt’s death, Kyra unexpectedly inherits the Hollow Garden. A sprawling Victorian graveyard of crumbling mausoleums, ruined monuments, and paths tangled with the rare Night Ivy that has grown there for generations.

‘The place she returns to is not the one she remembers. Time has transformed it into something stranger, its shadows heavy with secrets long hidden behind graves and mausoleum. Family resentments linger, and an old flame is unwilling to let the past remain buried.

‘As old memories begin to surface, Kyra is forced to confront the tragedy she has spent years trying to forget. What really happened on the night Eleanor died? And why have those around her worked so hard to bury the truth?

‘The estate was never meant to be hers.

‘And the Hollow Garden has a will of its own.

‘Nostalgia is for those who sleep well.’

In The Hollow Garden, by Natalie Grace Lewis, thirtysomething Kyra is living a small, quiet life in Oxford, working as a library assistant and looking after her “Uncle Roo” following his stroke. Then she receives a letter informing her that her Aunt Magda has died, leaving her the Hollow Garden: the Midlands estate comprising a manor house and graveyard where she grew up, and fled 13 years previously.

Seventeen years ago, when Kyra was a teenager, her friend Eleanor died after falling from a church tower on the estate. Catatonic with grief, and led to believe it was her fault Eleanor fell, Kyra was committed to an old-fashioned asylum – also on her family’s land – where she spent four years restrained and doped up until she managed to escape.

Kyra reluctantly returns to the Hollow Garden with every intention of relinquishing it – and the accompanying eye-watering inheritance tax bill – to her older half-sister Dana, who’s been running the estate and associated funeral business in her absence. But the obligation to stay for three nights, during which Kyra sees shadowy figures, uncovers long-lost memories, and starts to suspect Magda’s death wasn’t entirely natural, renews her attachment to her old home and motivates her to dig for the truth.

I liked The Hollow Garden a lot! The quality of the writing and the dark, Gothic atmosphere the author spins up meant I was more than willing to suspend my disbelief and go along with the particularly out-there events and revelations of the book (let’s just say the asylum and the in-universe version of the Bodleian really need to rethink their security practices!).

Befitting the genre, the estate feels like a character in itself, with its unique features such as the Black Ivy, and the way the characters who care for the place think and speak about it. For Kyra, coming back after such a long period is akin to reuniting with a person she was very close to: despite her attempts to harden her heart, she’s reminded of all the quirks she once knew so well, and can feel the land – full of dead bodies as it is – urging her to uncover and repair the injustices committed on and against it.

The notion of a big old chunk of land devoted to honouring the dead (and attracting the death industry to the area), as well as the flora Magda cultivated for healing purposes: be still my Gothic heart! Magda, for the mistakes she made keeping information from Kyra, was very much a “good witch”, minding children who’d lost parents (Kyra was the result of an affair, and her mother – Magda’s sister – died during childbirth), offering succour to the bereaved, and brewing up concoctions. Kyra has some supernatural-seeming experiences during her stay, and we have to wait to find out what’s behind them.

For the most part, I felt sympathy for Kyra (I just hope the rare books she stole from her workplace in the name of research were returned in the end!). Purely through accident of birth, she’s been manipulated and scapegoated, even by people who had her best interests at heart, her entire life. Dana goads her for running away, even though Kyra has indicated she’ll be signing the estate over to her, and how could anyone blame her for wanting to get away from a place where she was forcibly imprisoned and mistreated for years?

A secondary family, who live in the gatehouse, are siblings Priory and Hurley – contemporaries of Dana and Kyra who grew up alongside them – and Celine, who’s much younger and being raised by her brother and sister following the death of their parents. Kyra was especially close to Priory as a teenager, and seeing him again puts an additional strain on her.

As is gradually revealed over the course of the novel, the two families’ histories are very intertwined – and the business-minded Dana pays no heed to this, planning to evict the trio and demolish the gatehouse once Kyra signs over the land. Saying that, Priory and Hurley could probably use a bit of psychic distance from the Hollow Garden, as their attachment to the past leads them to self-sabotage in ways that are almost painful to read about.

I guessed what the biggest twist would be quite early on, but that didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the story – I wanted to see when and how it would come out (or, alternatively, if I was wrong!), and I think it’s actually an expected trope of the modern Gothic genre anyway.

The Hollow Garden is a compelling and atmospheric Gothic yarn.