---

Vita is South African but she lives in Australia. Royce is older, American, a ghost from her days as a freshman on a Harvard scholarship. After years of silence, Royce writes to Vita, determined to excavate the past. The conversation that follows is an adversarial dance, a duelling confession and a mutual reckoning, digging through the archaeologies of desire, shame and power.

---

A literary tour-de-force of power, guilt and obsession - two people stalk each other through the shadowy, tangled web of the past - man and woman caught in a dangerous game of confession, each partly predator and partly prey...

´It has been almost fifteen years. I´ve thought about you often, mostly unkindly. But there: I have thought about you.´

Nearly twenty years after Vita broke off contact with Royce, he writes to her, determined to excavate the past. He is older than her, a ghost from her university days, a former benefactor she has tried hard to forget. In his own youth, Royce spent two fateful summers working on a dig in Pompeii with a woman he would later memorialize with a scholarship - the same one that Vita eventually received.

From opposite sides of the world, Royce and Vita enter into an adversarial dance: an attempt to settle old accounts. Profoundly addictive and unsettling, In the Garden of the Fugitives is a thrilling psychological examination of what happens when the lines are blurred between victim and predator, between loyalty and obsession.

Praise for Ceridwen Dovey

´Strange and richly imagined, haunting and atmospheric... [Dovey] unflinchingly illuminates human nature´ The New York Times onOnly the Animals

´Painfully beautiful, heartbreaking and riveting... Dovey voices the uncomfortable, she speaks the unspeakable... An ambitious book with a fable-like surface and a whole churning world beneath´ Guardian onOnly the Animals

---

This psychological thriller examines what happens when the lines between victim and predator, loyalty and obsession become blurred´ Mail on Sunday

---

Dovey, Ceridwen
Ceridwen Dovey´s debut novel, Blood Kin, was published around the world, shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Award, and selected for the US National Book Foundation´s prestigious ´5 Under 35´ honours list. The Wall Street Journal named her as one of their ´artists to watch´. Her collection of stories, Only the Animals, won the 2014 Readings New Australian Writing Award. She lives in Sydney.

---