Statues in a Garden

Never before available in the United States, this rediscovered masterpiece from Isabel Colegate, author of The Shooting Party, offers readers "just the right mixture of doomed fun, melancholy and faintly lascivious despair" (The Observer)

“I am afraid I have something to tell you . . . It is that we are all about to be destroyed.”

1914. The old standards are going. There is bitterness in politics, talk of civil war in Ireland. But all this means little to Cynthia Weston, the attractive wife of cabinet member Aylmer Weston, and her nephew by marriage, Philip. They are caught up in the charmed, perilous toils of a mutual passion that will destroy all they hold most dear—while the shadow of war lengthens and darkens, ready to swallow them whole.

A captivating portrait of a lost world, Statues in a Garden is a rediscovered masterpiece by one of the most important and neglected British female writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.“Colegate’s novels offer readers clear-eyed, illuminating windows onto this now bygone world . . . Colegate has no equal . . . In shining a light on the past, Colegate also illuminates the present.”
—The Paris Review

“Remarkable. I can think of no work of fiction that brings [this period] to life so fully and subtly.”
—The Washington Post

“Isabel Colegate is not afraid of ideas nor of using fiction to express them. In this rich and fascinating book, someone is hiding something—possibly everyone is.” —Los Angeles TimesISABEL COLEGATE was the acclaimed author of many bestselling books, including The Orlando Trilogy, Statues in a Garden, and Winter Journey. The Shooting Party, first published in 1980, was an international bestseller and the winner of the W. H. Smith Literary Award for the British book of the year. It was made into a celebrated motion picture starring James Mason, Edward Fox, and John Gielgud. Colegate lived near Bath, England, and died in 2023.