In The Forgotten Garden, history repeats itself. All of the Mountrachet women are crowned with red hair and clichéd desires to match; their lives are unavoidably shaped by fairy tales (these tales are periodically inserted into the text, reinforcing already obvious connections between the subplots). Each character suffers as a result of physical or emotional trauma. Their thoughts, actions and motivations are uniformly expressed; in fact, the subject noun is so frequently removed from sentences (and the women’s experiences so similarly sketched) that readers, but for each chapter’s impressive historical context, could be confused as to which character the narrator was describing.

Yet the juxtaposition of the past and its analogous present manages to convey that the loss of ancestral history is an absence that can haunt families for generations. It reminds readers of the mutability of personal identity, and of how unreliable memory can be when it is coloured by nostalgia. These themes hover on the margins of each page of The Forgotten Garden, tantalising and unresolved.