The Peace Garden

“There’s much to enjoy in Fiona Veitch Smith’s debut adult novel, The Peace Garden, where the hopes and fears of modern South Africa disrupt the
neatly-ordered flowerbeds of suburban Newcastle. Natalie Porter, twelve years old and insatiably curious, starts to uncover the stories that have shaped the adults around her, and progresses from catching a plant thief to beginning to understand some of the complexities of life and love in a post-Apartheid society. The novel ratchets up to thriller pace and with a nice twist on the traditional ‘follow-that-car’scene as Natalie, older but not much wiser, realises she may be the only person who can thwart a potential murderer.The Peace Garden is a cleverly-plotted novel with nice comic touches, and the author’s personal background produces both a convincing setting for the Newcastle characters, and some telling insights into South African life.”

RS Downie is the New York Times bestselling author of the Ruso series of Roman mysteries.

http://rsdownie.co.uk/

This is the fascinating tale of an uneasy mix between English suburban values and South African apartheid, which builds up to an unexpectedly explosive finale. The unlikely starting-point of plants being stolen from the gardens of a quiet Newcastle street draws you in, as does the deftly-portrayed character of young Natalie Porter, a floating trophy of her parents\' ever-shifting diplomatic/journalistic lifestyle, who finds a semblance of permanence staying with her Geordie grandmother - and leaps at the opportunity to emulate her fictional heroine, girl-detective Nancy Drew.
Natalie\'s sleuthing efforts bring her into contact with an enigmatic black South African academic and his teenage son living at the end of the road. Everyone has them down as the plant thieves; and issues of racial prejudice are sensitively explored both in the English suburban context and, later, in South Africa itself.
Interwoven with the escalating mystery of the missing plants and the past lives of the possible perpetrators - which brings the reader unavoidably face-to-face with the tragic history of apartheid - is the delicately portrayed off-and-on romance that develops between young Natalie and Thabo, the bitter South African teenager now forced by circumstances to live with his father in Britain. Is he a `good guy\' or a `bad guy\'? Natalie\'s doubts on this score - and the reader\'s - persist almost to the last page.
This is a great story, with a compulsively page-turning conclusion, which also gives the reader an inside look at many of the conflicting issues of racial prejudice in its most notorious institutional expression - apartheid South Africa.

The Peace Garden is a tense, funny, fascinating and moving book. The last chapter left me desperately seeking the next book by this talented writer.

Gillian D'Achada, Sanlam Award-winning author of Sharkey's Son

http://www.gilliandachada.com