"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

In The Closed Room

Frances Hodgson Burnett, born in Manchester and relocated to America during her adolescence following the death of her father, swiftly became the breadwinner for her family by crafting fiction for popular magazines. Hodgson demonstrated a talent for transforming clichés about England into captivating narratives tailored for the American mass-market: though she initially focused on creating dialect stories featuring North Country working women, she started writing stories about children after her marriage to Swan Burnett, an American, and the birth of her two sons. She will unfortunately lose one of them to tuberculosis. Aside from The Secret Garden, her other renowned masterpiece is Little Lord Fauntleroy, the epitome of the Beautiful Child genre.

This short story features a garden too, and children of course, in a charming way that can only be compared to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel “The Scarlet Letter”. Only the garden is open, endless, and it’s hidden in a closed room.

You can download an eBook today on my Patreon.
Summertime

Omeros in the Caribbeans

Derek Walcott was a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, and painter, and one of the major voices of Caribbean literature. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, and his work often explores Caribbean history, identity, colonial inheritance, and the meeting of European and African

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August 9, 2026 6:00 am
books and literature

Ioanna Papadopoulou’s The Castaway and the Witch

I had a genuine “oh shit” moment when I read the author’s preface saying this was darker than “Winter Harvest” because – and I absolutely ADORED “Winter Harvest” – that was pitch-black dark. I thought “we’re all going to die”. This maybe has something to

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Summertime

The Path You Have to Sing

Alexis Wright‘s Carpentaria, an epic work set in a fictional town called Desperance, opens before there are any people in it at all: an ancestral serpent, “a creature larger than storm clouds,” descends from the stars and drags itself across the wet clay of the

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Omeros in the Caribbeans

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Derek Walcott was a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, and painter, and one of the major voices of Caribbean literature. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, and his work often explores Caribbean history, identity, colonial inheritance, and the meeting of European and African

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