Lost in the Garden

Signed by the author


Shortlisted for the Nero Book Award for Fiction 2024

Like an old wives’ tale, like a piece of wisdom passed down through generations which no one questioned of even thought about too hard. Like folklore. It was just something everyone knew, a rule to be followed.
Don’t go to Almanby.

Heather, Rachel and Antonia are going to Almanby.

Heather needs to find her boyfriend who, like so many, went and never came back.

Rachel has a mysterious package to deliver, and her life depends on it.

And Antonia - poor, lovestruck Antonia just wants the chance to spend the day with Heather.

So off they set through the idyllic yet perilous English countryside, in which nature thrives in abundance and summer lasts forever, and as they travel through ever-shifting geography and encounter strange voices in the fizz of shortwave radio, the harder it becomes to tell friend from foe.

Creepy, dreamlike, unsettling and unforgettable - you are about to join the privileged few who come to understand exactly why we don't go to Almanby.

‘Eerily enchanting and profoundly inventive, Adam S. Leslie’s Lost in the Garden is a dreamy and unsettling masterwork written with such care and aplomb. In this perfectly composed and dazzlingly intricate folk horror phantasmagoria, reality becomes infected while a charming and yet deeply sinister strangeness crawls from page to page, chapter to chapter. This is one of the freshest and most spiritually rewarding novels I’ve read in quite some time.’ -- Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

'Lost in the Garden is like trying to recall a troubling and beautiful dream; it's like peering through a wound in the world; sorrowful, uncanny and utterly stunning. This book is magnificent, like nothing I’ve ever read before.' -- Matt Wesolowski, author of the Six Stories series

‘England’s overheating, death-warped countryside is a genius setting for Leslie’s shamelessly unhinged novel – equal parts road trip and bad acid trip. But for all the weirdness, it’s the characterisation that makes the novel so compelling: Lost in the Garden has a wit and groundedness that bring something fresh to the folk horror tradition.' -- Matt Hill, author of Lamb

'A supremely atmospheric page-turner that should delight fans of John Wyndham and Alan Garner.' -- Fortean Times