Category: Reading Challenges

Book Review – A Year in a Small Garden by Frances Tophill #ReadNonFicChal

whatcathyreadnext8 Comments

About the Book

Front cover of A Year in a Small Garden by Frances Tophill featuring the authot standing in a lid garden

A Year in a Small Garden follows Frances Tophill as she creates her new garden in a terraced house in Devon. Working in a small space, the book documents her journey to bring life to her garden, including tips and tricks for you to achieve similar results in whatever spaces you have at home.

The book is structured around the stages of building her small garden, and branches out to include small community gardens Frances works with, as well as projects to create in small spaces at home – with a focus on growing food and planting in a sustainable, environmentally friendly way.

Featuring new photography shot throughout the year, as well as Frances’s own journal and garden notebooks, this book will not only give you an insight into Frances’s journey creating her first garden – but will help you create a beautiful, productive, garden at home.

Format: Hardcover (256 pages) Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Publication date: 25th April 2024 Genre: Nonfiction

Find A Year in a Small Garden on Goodreads

Purchase A Year in a Small Garden from Bookshop.org [Disclosure: If you buy books linked to our site, we may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops]

My Review

Gardening is my other passion aside from reading and Frances Tophill is one of my favourite presenters on BBC’s Gardeners’ World programme. The book was a birthday present from my husband.

Subtitled ‘Creating a Beautiful Garden in Any Space’, A Year in a Small Garden displays Frances’ personal approach to gardening. If you like your garden to have straight lines, a manicured lawn (or, God forbid, artificial grass), flowers grown for their appearance rather than their usefulness and no sign of anything edible, then this is not the book for you. Unless, of course, you are open to persuasion that there’s a different and more sustainable way to garden. Luckily, I’m very much in tune with Frances’ approach to gardening: naturalistic, using native species where possible, growing a wide variety of fruit and vegetables, peat and pesticide free, and creating habitats to encourage wildlife.

I loved Frances’ delight at acquiring a garden of her own at last and her excitement about planning how to design it and what to grow. Her garden is relatively small and therefore her decisions about what to place where, whether that’s garden structures, seating areas or plants, will be relatable to a lot of people. It is also particularly useful for those inheriting an already established garden as many of Frances’ early decisions involve whether or not to remove existing trees and shrubs, as well as how to cope with the garden’s challenging east-facing aspect. She freely admits that she ignored the usual advice of simply observing the garden for a year before making too many changes. I’d be the same in her place!

The book contains lots of practical advice, such as choosing the right tree for your garden (with the emphasis on native species), tips for successfully propagating plants and, of particular interest for me since it’s a project I’m embarking on this year, building a wildlife pond. There are beautiful photographs and I really liked the inclusion of excerpts from Frances’ journal. I also enjoyed reading about some of the gardens she visited for inspiration, including community gardening projects.

Frances’ mantra is to use recycled materials wherever possible. Hence her wonderfully eccentric greenhouse constructed out of old window and door frames. She prioritises growing things that have either a medicinal or edible use, or are wildlife friendly, and sees no problem in combining flowers plants with fruit and vegetables.

A Year in a Small Garden is an engaging combination of down-to-earth practical advice and inspiration. It also gave me an insight into her particularly interesting and varied career. It is however a very particular approach that perhaps won’t fit everyone’s idea of what a garden should be. I confess I found myself a little dismayed at some of the changes Frances is considering which seem to me to risk losing some of its character. However, I’m sure it’s a book I will go back to time and time again when in need of encouragement or inspiration because, as Frances says, ‘no garden is ever finished’.

A Year in a Small Garden fits the ‘Garden’ category of the 2025 Nonfiction Reader Challenge.

In three words: Practical, inspiring, authentic
Try something similar: Hortobiography by Carol Klein

About the Author

Author and gardener Frances Tophill

Frances started her love affair with plants doing an NVQ and apprenticeship at The Salutation Garden in Kent followed quickly by a degree in Horticulture with Plantsmanship at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

Her practical gardening experience is extensive, she worked a season at Monet’s garden, has worked at the Andromeda Botanical Garden in Barbados and has done WWOOF work at a number of different locations including work on vineyards and in viticulture.  Frances has spent many years working in gardens with vulnerable adults, including adults with learning disabilities and mental health challenges.  She is passionate about conversation and sustainability and has worked in native tree planting for the Conifer Conservation Project in Edinburgh and for Moor Trees in Devon.  Frances is the Patron of Thanet Urban Forest and works with the RHS on the Campaign for School Gardening.  She is currently Head Gardener and Grower at Sharpham Trust.

In 2022 Frances was awarded best show garden for a sustainable garden design and build at Gardeners’ World Live. On screen Frances is know for her work with Gardeners’ World and Love Your Garden.  She is the author of four books and her down to earth nature make her a popular speaker at garden events. (Photo: Amazon author page/Bio: Arlington Talent Agency)

Connect with Frances
Instagram

Book Review – The Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O’Connor @vintagebooks

whatcathyreadnext2 Comments

About the Book

Front cover of The Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O'Connor

February 1944. Six months since Nazi forces occupied Rome. Inside the beleaguered city, the Contessa Giovanna Landini is a member of the band of Escape Line activists known as ‘The Choir’. Their mission is to smuggle refugees to safety and help Allied soldiers, all under the nose of Gestapo boss Paul Hauptmann.

During a ferocious morning air raid a mysterious parachutist lands in Rome and disappears into the backstreets. Is he an ally or an imposter? His fate will come to put the whole Escape Line at risk.

Meanwhile, Hauptmann’s attention has landed on the Contessa. As his fascination grows, she is pulled into a dangerous game with him – one where the consequences could be lethal.

Format: Hardcover (384 pages) Publisher: Harvill Secker
Publication date: 30th January 2025 Genre: Historical Fiction

Find The Ghosts of Rome on Goodreads

Purchase The Ghosts of Rome from Bookshop.org [Disclosure: If you buy books linked to our site, we may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops]

My Review

The Ghosts of Rome is the second book in the author’s Rome Escape Line trilogy. I loved My Father’s House but, if that’s possible, I loved this one even more. As before, the book has a wonderful cast of characters. (Many of them were real people who committed acts of the utmost bravery as part of the actual Choir.)

The author brings each character brilliantly to life, in particular through the invented transcripts of interviews recorded twenty years after the events, allowing us to hear the distinctive voices the author has created for them. For example, the acerbic wit and Irish lilt of diplomat’s wife, Delia Kiernan (my favourite) or the Cockney accent and sardonic asides of John May.

As the book opens, Gestapo chief Paul Hauptmann is under increasing pressure from Berlin to bring an end to the activities of ‘The Choir’ and capture the escaped Allied prisoners hidden in places across Rome and in the Vatican City itself. Not only is his career on the line but the lives of his wife and daughters too, removed for ‘safe keeping’ by Himmler. Increasingly he tries to justify his own actions: the brutal interrogation of prisoners, the meticulous drawing up of death lists for savage reprisals. ‘Important to push away weakness. Too far along the road. Sometimes a man of peace must perform terrible duties, he tells himself. I had to do what I did, there was no other choice.’ And he has become obsessed with one particular member of the Choir, Contessa Giovanna Landini (known as Jo to her comrades).

Having taken possession of her palazzo, he wanders its corridors admiring her furniture, selecting paintings he thinks Hitler might appreciate, examining her extensive wardrobe and choosing gowns to send to his wife Elise in a vain attempt to win back her favour. (He’s almost certain she’s being unfaithful.) He raids the Contessa’s wine cellar, listens to her records, examines her books and takes midnight strolls in her garden. ‘She feels close to him here – every garden is a portrait of its owner.’ Most creepily of all, he takes to sleeping in her bed.

For The Choir, operating the escape line has become a cat and mouse game but one in which there are thousands of Nazi cats for every mouse. No mercy is shown to those who harbour escapees, there are tempting rewards for those prepared to inform and harsh reprisals on the population of Rome for German soldiers killed in acts of resistance. Add to this Allied bombing raids, food and fuel shortages, and Rome has become a very uncomfortable place in which to live.

The Choir’s missions outside the Vatican have become increasingly dangerous and the burden of responsibility for so many lives is huge. There are escapees hidden in every nook and cranny of Rome: abandoned buildings, crawl spaces, cellars, tunnels, even catacombs. It weighs on all the members of The Choir, but particularly on Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty whom the others look to for guidance. He is physically and mentally exhausted, and finding less and less solace in prayer. ‘Pallid, puff-eyed, watchful, uncombed, he has started to acquire the aura of a man who lives in shadow.’ No wonder, with a bounty on his head. As he confides to Jo, ‘I’m lately on a mission into a shadowy old dungeon – my head – to rescue a beaten-down prisoner – my soul.’

Like My Father’s House, the book combines thrilling action scenes that are full of tension with wonderful writing. There’s also an intriguing sub-plot involving an injured airman that explores the sort of moral dilemmas members of The Choir face. Is saving the life of one man worth endangering the lives of others, including your comrades? Can you live with yourself if you turn away and do nothing?

By the end of the book we know, sadly, there are characters we won’t meet again. But the work must go on because the Nazis are not yet defeated and a savage beast is often most dangerous when cornered.

I found The Ghosts of Rome an utterly compelling historical thriller, full of tension and authentic detail. Although I shall be sorry for the series to end, at the same time I cannot wait for the final book.

In three words: Gripping, suspenseful, immersive

About the Author

Author Joseph O'Connor

Joseph O’Connor’s fiction has been published in forty languages. His twenty books include eleven novels, among them the million-selling Star of the Sea, Ghost Light, Shadowplay and My Father’s House, a Washington Post Book of the Year. His work has been shortlisted for the LA Times Book Award, twice for the Whitbread/Costa and twice for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and has won the Nielsen Bookscan Golden Book Award, France’s Millepages, Italy’s Premio Acerbi and Premio Napoli, an American Library Association Award, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the Hennessey Writer of the Year and Hall of Fame Awards, the Eason/An Post Novel of the Year Award, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Achievement and the Prix Madeline Zepter for European Novel of the Year. He is Frank McCourt Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick.

Connect with Joseph
Website