Yesterday I took my two gift cards to the university bookstore and rooted around the shelves looking for books with which to redeem them. I chose an Everyman edition of the selected works of P.G. Wodehouse, a new edition of the very first Mary Stewart novel I read as a teenager, The Ivy Tree, and Helen Humphreys' The Lost Garden. My good friend Susie had recommended the latter to me after I finished, and declared my unending devotion to, Humphreys' Afterimage. I began reading The Lost Garden while waiting to pick up my husband from work. And I kept dipping into it during the rest of the evening, into the night, grabbing at it first thing this morning. I had to keep reading it. I want to keep reading it still, even though I've finished it. It stays, haunts, and speaks into one's thoughts, gets in one's veins. It just doesn't stop reading itself into you. I loved it.

Humphreys gives us an ugly duckling heroine, Gwen Davis, who is sent to a country estate as part of the Woman's Land Army to help produce potatoes for the war effort during the London Blitz of WWII. She abandons her project (finding a cure for parsnip canker) at the Royal Horticultural Society, but carries with her a chance encounter with Virginia Woolf, a cache of books (including The Genus Rosa that anchors her), and the memory of a dead mother disappointed in her (Gwen's) looks. If that isn't enough to intrigue, I don't know what is. Additionally, Humphreys writes poetically, convincingly, hauntingly about love and grief, loss and longing. Using the garden as metaphor, Gwen's beautifully expressed thoughts, and the obsessions/confessions of Jane and Raley, Humphreys manages to produce what Shakespeare In Love's Elizabeth demanded of Will Shakespeare (Can a play show us the very truth and nature of love?): a story about authentic love. Not the fabricated love of convention or narrative construction, but the feel of it in your blood, pulsing in your brain. This is a truly wonderful novel.

There are so many lovely, complex details/images in the narrative: naming the girls after potatoes (just as the Navy's ships are named for flowers), the lost garden Gwen discovers/creates while realizing how those two acts are inevitably entwined, the author's needles knitting together Woolf's To the Lighthouse with her own narrative even as Woolf's masterpiece is being read to a knitting soldier, the coalescence of ghosts and lovers . . . I could go on, but it's more fun if you just rush out and buy a copy for yourself.

Told in the first person, Gwen becomes something alive, as vibrant and real as Raley's dream of the burning roses. She grabs us right away with her thoughts on love:

This is what I know about love. That it is tested every day, and what is not renewed is lost. One chooses either to care more or to care less. Once the choice is to care less, then there is no stopping the momentum of goodbye. Each loved thing slips away without protest. There is no stopping it.

Gwen's voice is strong and intriguing from the outset of the narrative, and what we slowly discover about her, through memory and experience, is brilliant and moving: "Grief is love, I suppose. Love as a backward glance."

And one more excerpt. An unwritten (though written for us) letter from our heroine to the missing (and presumed dead) Virginia Woolf:

Dear Mrs. Woolf.

Of your books, I must say that I like To the Lighthouse best of all. It is a perfect garden. The right mix of order and chaos. I admire (No) I love how the lighthouse, always in the background of the story, is to some extent Mrs. Ramsay herself. How the strokes of light are part of the emotional rhythm of Mrs. Ramsay.

I would say (No) Is it true, perhaps, that this book is really about the haunting of memory? This is also what makes it a perfect garden because that's what flowers are sometimes to us, ghosts.

Did you once walk through Tavistock Square, seven years ago now, in June? This is what haunts me. And now that you are lost (No) Now that you've gone missing, I might never know your answer.

I liked in To the Lighthouse that the big questions Mr. Ramsay asked, about art and civilization, were directed to the escallonia hedge.

But I am thinking now of Tavistock Square, of London. I cannot go on with this letter in my head, this endless letter I go on thinking up and never actually send. And why do I continue to do this when the person to whom I would send it is perhaps not even still living? Habit? Need? Because it links me to that night in June seven years ago, when there was no war, when all the buildings were still in place on my particular route through the city. How I would link London up for myself as a series of green squares on the way to the river. Sunlight on grass. The white stone of the city churches against the night sky. Like bones, I could say they were like bones. I could say the city was a body I pressed to mine. The fine hair of the tall grasses in Highgate Cemetery. The smell of the river. That world as it was, the I will never inhabit again.

Humphreys' novel makes me want to read To the Lighthouse again. I haven't read that beautiful bit of prose since the summer before my father died. Woolf's novel is tied up, for me, in the sounds of the hammer and saw (he was pruning the back maple and putting in the last window that summer), the sick-sweet smell of too many melting Creamsicles, the knowledge that I hadn't appreciated him enough while he was here, accessible. So I haven't read it again, but I will do, now. Memory is as valuable as faith and love (especially since it inevitably informs both). Humphreys' Gwen doesn't shy away from loss, she lives its days and hours because that's what longing and love lead to.