textpublishing's review
5.0
‘A powerful book and the writing is mesmerising.’
Mercury
‘An extraordinarily powerful, unsettling and at times deeply moving tale.’
Sydney Review of Books
‘Harrowing reading, yet it’s beautiful too. An extraordinary novel.’
ANZ LitLovers
‘Hornung has given an allegory for the modern world…Genuine feeling for others is so much more important than adhering to doctrine. In this novel, when the lessons are learned, the Garden of Eden can have a different ending.’
Newtown Review of Books
‘Hornung writes with extraordinary force and insight…an amazing feat of imaginative power.’
Canberra Times
‘Astonishing…A strange, sombre, sobering triumph.’
Sydney Morning Herald
‘There’s human violence and the strength of animals…just gripping.’
Australian
‘The Last Garden is vivid, visceral and disconcerting. The descriptions of animals are intensely empathetic, and the book raises fundamental and confronting questions about how our animal and our human selves can or should co-exist.’
Books + Publishing
‘Eight years after the magical, Prime Minister’s Literary Award-winning Dog Boy, what a joy it is to have another beautifully-wrought novel by Adelaide author Eva Hornung.’
Adelaide Advertiser
‘Like all great literary fiction, The Last Garden provokes thought and empathy in equal measure. This visceral and utterly compelling new novel represents an ambitious new layer to Hornung’s continued investigation of the human condition, magnificently realised.’
Readings
‘This is a novel that is calm and patient in its telling, and almost hypnotic in its effect. What Hornung emphasises is that it’s neither our hopes for the future, nor the suffering of our pasts, that saves us. Rather, it’s in the act of living — the way we attune ourselves to the shifting demands of the world around us; the use we make of the time between “the first garden ... and the last” — that redemption is to be found.’
Australian
‘It's melancholy, beautiful, and deeply evocative. Michael Cathcart admitted to the writer that he knew he was going to love it from page one.’
Michael Cathcart, Radio National
‘Eva Hornung understands how critical human relationships with animals can be.’
Guardian
‘Yes, there are grotesque and sinister surprises aplenty in this weird prodigy of a book, but there is a lot of tenderness and an extraordinary beauty too.’
Saturday Paper
‘Melancholy, beautiful, and deeply evocative.’
RN Books and Arts
‘Full of symbolism but not overpowered by it, this is a powerful book, and the writing is mesmerising.’
Herald Sun
‘The Last Garden is by no means a long read but it is a big novel. Hornung’s characters, in all their awed complexity, will stay with you long after the covers of this powerful book are closed.’
Australian Book Review
‘Hornung’s knowledge and deep respect for the spiritual and emotional relationships between humans and animals shine through in her exquisite, glittering prose. This gentle, literary novel is a moving meditation on the heavy mist of grief, and will bring back a dark solace to the tormented heart.’
Big Issue
‘Full of symbolism but not overpowered by it, this is a powerful book, and the writing is mesmerising.’
Townsville Bulletin
‘Hornung is a writer of extraordinary power, using her omniscient narrator to inhabit the minds of Benedict’s father, the grieving child and the faltering pastor, following the flux of their thoughts with elegance and precision…An unusual and hypnotic novel.’
Age
‘Deep despair was cushioned by gorgeous writing in Eva Hornung’s The Last Garden.’
Bram Presser, Sydney Morning Herald’s Year in Reading
Mercury
‘An extraordinarily powerful, unsettling and at times deeply moving tale.’
Sydney Review of Books
‘Harrowing reading, yet it’s beautiful too. An extraordinary novel.’
ANZ LitLovers
‘Hornung has given an allegory for the modern world…Genuine feeling for others is so much more important than adhering to doctrine. In this novel, when the lessons are learned, the Garden of Eden can have a different ending.’
Newtown Review of Books
‘Hornung writes with extraordinary force and insight…an amazing feat of imaginative power.’
Canberra Times
‘Astonishing…A strange, sombre, sobering triumph.’
Sydney Morning Herald
‘There’s human violence and the strength of animals…just gripping.’
Australian
‘The Last Garden is vivid, visceral and disconcerting. The descriptions of animals are intensely empathetic, and the book raises fundamental and confronting questions about how our animal and our human selves can or should co-exist.’
Books + Publishing
‘Eight years after the magical, Prime Minister’s Literary Award-winning Dog Boy, what a joy it is to have another beautifully-wrought novel by Adelaide author Eva Hornung.’
Adelaide Advertiser
‘Like all great literary fiction, The Last Garden provokes thought and empathy in equal measure. This visceral and utterly compelling new novel represents an ambitious new layer to Hornung’s continued investigation of the human condition, magnificently realised.’
Readings
‘This is a novel that is calm and patient in its telling, and almost hypnotic in its effect. What Hornung emphasises is that it’s neither our hopes for the future, nor the suffering of our pasts, that saves us. Rather, it’s in the act of living — the way we attune ourselves to the shifting demands of the world around us; the use we make of the time between “the first garden ... and the last” — that redemption is to be found.’
Australian
‘It's melancholy, beautiful, and deeply evocative. Michael Cathcart admitted to the writer that he knew he was going to love it from page one.’
Michael Cathcart, Radio National
‘Eva Hornung understands how critical human relationships with animals can be.’
Guardian
‘Yes, there are grotesque and sinister surprises aplenty in this weird prodigy of a book, but there is a lot of tenderness and an extraordinary beauty too.’
Saturday Paper
‘Melancholy, beautiful, and deeply evocative.’
RN Books and Arts
‘Full of symbolism but not overpowered by it, this is a powerful book, and the writing is mesmerising.’
Herald Sun
‘The Last Garden is by no means a long read but it is a big novel. Hornung’s characters, in all their awed complexity, will stay with you long after the covers of this powerful book are closed.’
Australian Book Review
‘Hornung’s knowledge and deep respect for the spiritual and emotional relationships between humans and animals shine through in her exquisite, glittering prose. This gentle, literary novel is a moving meditation on the heavy mist of grief, and will bring back a dark solace to the tormented heart.’
Big Issue
‘Full of symbolism but not overpowered by it, this is a powerful book, and the writing is mesmerising.’
Townsville Bulletin
‘Hornung is a writer of extraordinary power, using her omniscient narrator to inhabit the minds of Benedict’s father, the grieving child and the faltering pastor, following the flux of their thoughts with elegance and precision…An unusual and hypnotic novel.’
Age
‘Deep despair was cushioned by gorgeous writing in Eva Hornung’s The Last Garden.’
Bram Presser, Sydney Morning Herald’s Year in Reading
tasmanian_bibliophile's review
4.0
‘He could not make sense of it all until he let a trickle of memory in: …’
Benedict Orion returns home to Wahreit from boarding school on the day that his father Matthias shoots his wife Eva and himself dead. Benedict, fifteen years old, discovers their bodies. The community of Wahreit is shocked. Wahreit, an isolated settlement set somewhere in colonial Australia has been founded by a community in exile awaiting the return of the Messiah. It is the ‘last garden’ of the title. But the community has been waiting for a long time, and Pastor Helfgott can feel some waverings of faith. He is not the leader that his predecessor was, and feels his deficiency keenly.
Benedict is unable to remain inside his parents’ home, and moves into the barn to live with the horses. Pastor Helfgott visits Benedict, bringing him food from the community. The novel marks the passage of the seasons. Benedict’s passage through grief is difficult to observe: he becomes more like the animals he is living with, and the community is unsure how to react. The horses, particularly the mare named Melba, provide Dominic with a focus and a way to relate to the external world. Dominic tries hard to keep hens as well (his mother had a collection of exotic hens) but there’s a fox to contend with.
Dominic’s difference becomes an issue with the community: especially when a scapegoat is needed. It has become clear that this isolated and closed community has flaws and faults.
As I read this beautifully written novel with its polished prose, I wondered if Dominic could ever find his way back to the world of humans. I wondered, too, about the community and Pastor Helfgott. Should they have done more, and what could they have done? Four themes stand out for me: the violence committed by humans (and not just that of Matthias Orion), the persistence and cunning of the fox, the strength of the horses, and the definition of redemption.
‘He opens the door with a firm hand and walks into the room.’
I found this novel unsettling in parts: I wanted to intervene in the story, to (somehow) improve Dominic’s life. It was a novel I wanted to read quickly (to know how it ended) and to read slowly (to enjoy the beauty of the writing). It’s a novel which will stay with me for a long time.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
Benedict Orion returns home to Wahreit from boarding school on the day that his father Matthias shoots his wife Eva and himself dead. Benedict, fifteen years old, discovers their bodies. The community of Wahreit is shocked. Wahreit, an isolated settlement set somewhere in colonial Australia has been founded by a community in exile awaiting the return of the Messiah. It is the ‘last garden’ of the title. But the community has been waiting for a long time, and Pastor Helfgott can feel some waverings of faith. He is not the leader that his predecessor was, and feels his deficiency keenly.
Benedict is unable to remain inside his parents’ home, and moves into the barn to live with the horses. Pastor Helfgott visits Benedict, bringing him food from the community. The novel marks the passage of the seasons. Benedict’s passage through grief is difficult to observe: he becomes more like the animals he is living with, and the community is unsure how to react. The horses, particularly the mare named Melba, provide Dominic with a focus and a way to relate to the external world. Dominic tries hard to keep hens as well (his mother had a collection of exotic hens) but there’s a fox to contend with.
Dominic’s difference becomes an issue with the community: especially when a scapegoat is needed. It has become clear that this isolated and closed community has flaws and faults.
As I read this beautifully written novel with its polished prose, I wondered if Dominic could ever find his way back to the world of humans. I wondered, too, about the community and Pastor Helfgott. Should they have done more, and what could they have done? Four themes stand out for me: the violence committed by humans (and not just that of Matthias Orion), the persistence and cunning of the fox, the strength of the horses, and the definition of redemption.
‘He opens the door with a firm hand and walks into the room.’
I found this novel unsettling in parts: I wanted to intervene in the story, to (somehow) improve Dominic’s life. It was a novel I wanted to read quickly (to know how it ended) and to read slowly (to enjoy the beauty of the writing). It’s a novel which will stay with me for a long time.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
wtb_michael's review
4.0
It took me a while after the dramatic start to really warm to this, but Hornung is a wonderful storyteller, not rushing through anything and really building up her isolated little world. The Last Garden is set in a small German religious community in the Adelaide hills sometime in the 1800s and examines grief, faith and nature in exacting and thoughtful ways. This didn't drag me along like [b:Dog Boy|6667541|Dog Boy|Eva Hornung|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1264641197s/6667541.jpg|6862442], but it was still a deeply interesting read.
archytas's review
5.0
Well, wasn't this an unexpected delight. I read way too many reviews of this before I read it, all of which gave me the wrong expectations (so you might want to stop now and just read the book). I can see why I got confused: the book is so subtle it would be easier to make it seem more definitive than it is. Stuff I liked:
Evocation of the Barossa I don't think about the Barossa much, although I spent much of the first decadeof my life there. But this book *smelt* like the Barossa. I could feel the heat, and the dusty wind, and see the grape vines, and taste the bottled fruit. It had that sense that strange set of interconnected communities which is both communal and isolated all at once. It had that weird nostalgia effect of making me ache and feel satisfied all at once, and I honestly don't know how Hornung did that because…
The world building is exquisite. There is a particular trick to inventing a perfectly real world that is all new, and yet feels like it just *should* exist, and Hornung pulls this off perfectly. This might smell, feel, look and taste like the Barossa, but it is an alterna-Barossa, a community existing in a distinct time and place which is not quite ours. The framing device of the Book of Seasons works beautifully, and also provides..
A tangled tension between change and continuityThis was one of the strongest themes of the book for me. The Book of Seasons lays out a sense of cyclical time, with the inherent timelessness and continuity that goes with it. But at its heart, the book is written to cope with jarring change, uprooted change, and that points to the lesson: that unchanging rhythm is a lie. Evidence of growth - economic, emotional, physical - abounds, which brings us to..
A celebration of humanityFrom the reviews I really had expected this to be much grimmer - I mean the premise is loaded with trauma. But its dominant themes were healing and growth, and the interlocked perspectives of the young pastor and the boy both reinforce this. Both have to recover, and also to grow (up?). Both have to shift worldview to understand and manage complexity, humanity and allowance for fraility and vulnerability. As they do so, they make deeper connections. It would be easy for this to be a simple condemnation of religion, but it's really much more nuanced than that: it is a condemnation of rigidity, abuse and control, maybe, but it is also a testament (heh) to what people - including people wothin these communities can do. There is an intreesting, and unexpected, celebration of women towards the end, which was unsettling in a very good way.
So, yeah, I think you could say I'm recommending this. It is the kind of book that you can savour well past when your eyes were on the text.
Evocation of the Barossa I don't think about the Barossa much, although I spent much of the first decadeof my life there. But this book *smelt* like the Barossa. I could feel the heat, and the dusty wind, and see the grape vines, and taste the bottled fruit. It had that sense that strange set of interconnected communities which is both communal and isolated all at once. It had that weird nostalgia effect of making me ache and feel satisfied all at once, and I honestly don't know how Hornung did that because…
The world building is exquisite. There is a particular trick to inventing a perfectly real world that is all new, and yet feels like it just *should* exist, and Hornung pulls this off perfectly. This might smell, feel, look and taste like the Barossa, but it is an alterna-Barossa, a community existing in a distinct time and place which is not quite ours. The framing device of the Book of Seasons works beautifully, and also provides..
A tangled tension between change and continuityThis was one of the strongest themes of the book for me. The Book of Seasons lays out a sense of cyclical time, with the inherent timelessness and continuity that goes with it. But at its heart, the book is written to cope with jarring change, uprooted change, and that points to the lesson: that unchanging rhythm is a lie. Evidence of growth - economic, emotional, physical - abounds, which brings us to..
A celebration of humanityFrom the reviews I really had expected this to be much grimmer - I mean the premise is loaded with trauma. But its dominant themes were healing and growth, and the interlocked perspectives of the young pastor and the boy both reinforce this. Both have to recover, and also to grow (up?). Both have to shift worldview to understand and manage complexity, humanity and allowance for fraility and vulnerability. As they do so, they make deeper connections. It would be easy for this to be a simple condemnation of religion, but it's really much more nuanced than that: it is a condemnation of rigidity, abuse and control, maybe, but it is also a testament (heh) to what people - including people wothin these communities can do. There is an intreesting, and unexpected, celebration of women towards the end, which was unsettling in a very good way.
So, yeah, I think you could say I'm recommending this. It is the kind of book that you can savour well past when your eyes were on the text.
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