A GARDEN OF HER OWN

A woman is torn between her writing career and the demands of her ailing husband in Phelps’ debut novel.

Amy James has a green thumb: In addition to managing her own exceptional garden, she writes a gardening column for her local newspaper. Her house, too, is exceptional, thanks to her husband, renowned architect Graham James, whose career has always overshadowed her own. Amy has found modest success collecting her columns into a book, and now she’s under contract to write a second one—a collection of essays about “unique female gardeners and their stunning garden designs.” It’s been hard to focus for the last year, however, due to Amy’s mother’s illness and death. (Annoyingly, “There was never a question of asking” the decade-older, self-absorbed Graham “to step up.”) Just as she’s finally beginning to visit the gardens she plans to write about, Graham delivers a shocking bit of news: He’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. As she tries to balance the preparations for Graham’s deteriorating health—which include selling their house and her garden with it—with traveling the country to do the necessary research for her book, Amy finds herself stretched beyond her limits. When her personal desires come in conflict with her marital responsibilities, which will she tend to, and which will she allow to wither on the vine? Phelps writes probingly about Amy’s marriage and her ambivalence toward it: “Even when not thrilled with the direction of their lives, she’d learned to find small, real pleasures in the white space of his ever-colorful life. It was an accommodation that they both accepted.” Though the stakes seem minor at first—the pressures of her book agent, her difficulties communicating with her husband—the pressures grow steadily in a way that makes the ending, when it arrives, feel truly explosive.

A slow-burning tale questioning what people owe to their spouses and to themselves.