The Garden of Lost Secrets

A. M. Howell's The Garden of Lost Secrets is a wartime mystery for 10 year olds set in the walled kitchen gardens of an earl's country estate.

What happens

Clara has been sent to Suffolk to live with her aunt and uncle. Her father came back from the Great War with gas poisoning, and her parents have gone to Devon so he can get better. It'll only be for "a short while", Mother says.

The welcome is not what Clara hoped for. Her aunt insists on being called Mrs Gilbert and fires off a list of rules the minute Clara arrives. Keep away from the woods, where soldiers are training. Keep away from the hothouses. Don't speak to the Earl. And there's a locked room on the landing that she mustn't go near.

Clara is carrying a secret of her own. Just before she left, a letter from the War Office came to the door and she slipped it into her pocket before her parents could see it. Now it's hidden inside her mattress, unopened. What would you do with a letter like that? Clara can't decide either, and it weighs on every page.

Then there's the boy. From her attic window she sees him slip out of the hothouses at night, jumpy as a hare. Nobody else seems to know he exists.

The gardens are gorgeous to read about. Steamy glasshouses full of pineapples, crows ignoring the scarecrows, rifles booming in the woods after dark. Clara has a sweet habit (borrowed from her dad) of saying hello to every new place. "Hello, wall." "Hello, fruit." It's the kind of detail that makes you feel how lonely she is and how hard she's trying.

Be aware that the book doesn't shy away from sad things. Mrs Gilbert slaps Clara in the first few days, after Clara wakes from a nightmare with a clump of her aunt's hair in her hand. Clara worries the letter can only mean someone has been hurt or killed. There are soldiers who may not come home, and a neighbour whose son has died. It's all handled gently, but a sensitive reader might want to talk it through.

If you've got a reader who loves a quiet, slow-burn mystery with a big house, a locked door and a grown-up who's clearly hiding something, this is a treat.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, A. M. Howell's The House of One Hundred Clocks has another girl whisked off to live in a grand house full of strange rules. This time it's Cambridge, and every clock must be kept ticking.