Libby inherits an old hotel from a father she'd never met. Although she wants to restore it, she can't afford the upkeep and things just keep getting worse. Her newfound brother and sister are convinced she's going to steal their birthright and when her business partner is kidnapped, Libby is suspected of the crime. She must prove her innocence or lose everything.

In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there's still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton's Paradise Lost to John Clare's enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded...

While restoring the front of a church, an old master plasterer rescues an injured pigeon and nurses her back to health.