praise for The Garden
“The genius of the novel is the way Beams continually intertwines fictional elements with true-to-life obstetric practices… Just as the pregnant women who were prescribed DES endured decades of fear and guilt about how the drug’s harms would manifest in their children, the patients in The Garden learn there is nothing they can do to take the doubt away. There is no monster for them to slay, or be defeated by. There is no catharsis. There is only one woman at a time, trying to navigate a world where, when it comes to her child’s welfare, she can never be completely at ease.”
—New York Times Book Review, Claire Oshetsky
“No one writes feminist historical fiction like Clare Beams. With her singular lyricism, elegance, and candor, The Garden powerfully illuminates what is, for many women, a private and isolating grief. Ingeniously using elements of the gothic and weaving in today’s most pressing questions about female bodily autonomy, Beams captures the magic, strangeness, terror, and all-consuming pressure of pregnancy, as well as the desperate desire for certainty and the abiding hope. I’m in awe of this book.”
—Jessamine Chan, author of The School for Good Mothers
“The Garden renders beautifully the uncanny, haunted space that pregnancy both occupies and creates. Beams’s glancing, needle-prick prose reminds me of Shirley Jackson’s work in its ability to conjure up women–their histories, their fears, the complexity of their desires, and their power. I loved this novel.”
—Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble
“Beams’ writing sets her apart, shimmering against the dark subject matter… Like an overgrown garden—untamable, lush, and wild in ways lovely and terrifying.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“THE GARDEN is a shimmering, sinister jewel of a novel, with an aching, Shirley Jackson like heart. Highly recommended!”
—Dan Chaon, author of Sleepwalk
“Beams’ second outing is a taut, tense, absorbing Gothic tale that deftly explores the complexity of women’s inner lives and their varied relationships to motherhood.”
—Booklist (starred)
“Clare Beams is a master of fiction…Born in the literary legacy of Angela Carter and Stephen King, THE GARDEN is, like every child, utterly itself in the end—miraculous and beautiful and strange.”
—Julia Phillips, author of Disappearing Earth
“Deliciously eerie and brilliantly written, Beams explores motherhood and gestation in a way that feels new and trailblazing, but that will also ring true to the lived experience of every woman who has ever been pregnant. A shimmering, strange, important novel— I couldn’t put it down.”
—Rufi Thorpe, author of The Knockout Queen
“Clare Beams casts an intoxicating spell with The Garden, a gothic tale about nature’s dark whims and the unknowable chaos of matrescence. Prepare to be haunted.”
—Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch
“Beams follows up her acclaimed novel The Illness Lesson with an atmospheric story of a strange obstetrical clinic in late-1940s Western Massachusetts…The author’s fans will delight in this inspired and unsettling work.”
“The Garden is a novel to devour whole. It is a page-turner, a puzzle, an assembly of piercing insights into womanhood, ambition, and autonomy, in language as bewitching as it is exact.”
—Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning
“THE GARDEN’s gender politics, barbed wit, moral complexity, and genuine sense of unease recalls the best of Shirley Jackson’s work…This swirling marvel of a novel cements Clare Beams as a read-everything-she-ever-writes writer.”
—Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts