I gave him a few coins and he took me by the arm to the front of the church, switched on some inadequate lights and showed me a series of paintings. Recent novels include The Cleaner of Chartres (2012), which considers the plight of unmarried mothers whose children are taken from them; Cousins (2016), which explores the moral dilemmas of assisted suicide, a cause to which Vickers has put her name; The Librarian (2018), which includes biographical information in the author's notes; Grandmothers (2019), which is based on her work as a psychotherapist and which explores intergenerational relationships; and The Gardener, which was published in November 2021. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. After her initial teaching career, she retrained as a Jungian analytical psychotherapist, subsequently working in the NHS.

I knew from talking to people at quite an intimate level that there is a longing for what I can only describe as traditional values, by which I mean in this case, art, the ancient story of Tobias and the angel, the paintings of Venice, even the character of my heroine.And Miss Garnet herself may prove to be an angel, but nowhere in this haunting, beautifully textured and multilayered novel is anything quite what it appears to be. By the time she was at university in the early 1970s she said she had, "crushingly high standards" in writing. Julia Garnet is sixty years old, emotionally repressed, sexually inexperienced and has spent her life in almost sacrificial frugality. Why would Julia Garnett apparently realize that her would-be-lover is hot for her very young boy Italian pseudo-pupil and not inform the police, or at the very least check up on the boy? From the gloom inside immediately a figure shuffled toward me stretching out hi hand for what I understood as a plea for money.

Something which occurred in many small ways throughout the writing of the book: I had written the Epiphany scene before I had realised that the Magi, who visit the Christ child at Epiphany, are for the tribe of the Medians who are Zoroastrian priests; then I had written the important scenes which occur on the bridge by the church of the Angel Raphael, before I had learned that the bridge is a key Zoroastrian image for the threshold of worlds. The main character Julia Garnet is an elderly lady who has held herself tightly controlled through most of her life, but upon the death of her friend and roommate through the past 30 years she embarks on a journey to Venice, where she is captured by its beauty and magic, and not least the angel Raphael, depicted in paintings and sculptures around the historical city, seems to have a special grasp on her. However, she mentions in a discussion on the 'Confessions' podcast with Giles Fraser that she was a "baby of the National Health Service", and her doctor's first "National Health baby" in 1948.But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? This is a tough book to describe, it reads like literature, with a strong reliance on the setting - mostly Venice - and characterisation of the protagonist. And I have a special dislike of the conviction of being ‘right’ —I hope the book might dislodge some certainties and liberate a kind of creative subversiveness. Vickers tries to interweave these two stories but as the outcome of the older one had already been laid out for the reader, I wished it would just go away.

She went on to teach English at the Open University, Oxford and Stanford, specialising in Shakespeare, the 19th-century novel and 20th-century poetry. Part of her charm reveals itself when she finds herself captivated by the ancient tale of Tobias and the Angel through the religious artworks of Venice. Diary entries fancifully addressed to TV host Ellen DeGeneres serve as flashbacks to Lily’s teenage years, when she met her first love, Atlas Corrigan, a homeless boy she found squatting in a neighbor’s house.

Through it all, an overarching, timeless vision of “a world poised between truth and lies” shines through —filtered through the enigmatic character of contemporary Venice itself. Neither the war as whole, nor even the Blitz, impinges much on the narrative - both men are frighteningly at sea in personal emotional anguish - but fear hangs like a pall over this sombre novel. Both Julia and Harriet were dutifully pro-labour, even deriving a sense of moral superiority - or at least moral purity - from the connection.