The highly anticipated penultimate volume of the best-selling septology by Solvej Balle ??Our century's answer to Proust? (A.O. Scott, The New York Times)

In the sixth installment of Solvej Balle's ?speculative masterwork? (New York), Tara Selter travels from her old house in Clairon-sous-Bois (where her beloved husband still resides unaware of his wife's predicament) to a plant nursery outside Napoli, joining the band of other time-trapped people who have decamped there to grow vegetables in the same November day. How can we live, Balle's story asks now more urgently than ever, in a world where, for so long, repeated acts of depletion and plunder have been the only means to survival? ?One must tend one's own garden,? urged Epicurus (and Voltaire), and Balle too elevates this principle of cultivation?both literal and metaphorical in its underpinnings?as a guiding principle for her characters, who have journeyed so far from the world and the people that they once knew and loved. Tara's fellow time-trapped friends try to focus on the garden, but some are beginning to lose hope, struggling to find purpose inside a time snare so unfathomable and profound?where, as time circles on, death looms more and more, as the only certain means of escape? Volume Six of Solvej Balle's septology is a breathtaking performance from a novelist working at the very height of her powers: she is showing us?in reshaping the possibilities of the novel form?the vital hope of change, and if not exactly a way out of our own traps, then at least the possibility of reimagining our daily existence.