David Mitchell, who comes from Southport, embarked as a very young man on the same journey as Jo and ended up spending 8 years teaching in Hiroshima. This is his fifth novel and its easy to see why it was a number one best-seller last year. You don’t have to love Japan to love this book, but to those, like me, who do, its a riveting read. There are even some passages about gardening. Jacob de Zoet’s friend, Dr Marinus, is writing a Flora Japonica and studied under Professor Linnaeus. He says: “Great men are greatly complex beings. It’s true that Linnaean taxonomy underlies botany, but he taught also that swallows hibernate under lakes; that twelve foot giants thump about Patagonia; and that Hottentots are monorchids, possessing but a single testicle. They have two. I looked. “Deus creavit,” his motto ran, “Linnaeus disposuit” and dissenters were heretics whose careers must be crushed” Somehow, I don’t think I’d have picked that up from reading The Garden.
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