S alley Vickers’s new novel begins with a woman in her forties moving to a run-down cottage in the Shropshire village of Hope Wenlock.

Lovely in parts, and I wanted to enjoy, but not a fan of a book where the characters are terrible to the Muslim character and… nobody is ever held to account?It is a story of where fantasy meets reality, of the slow onset of a consuming love and, most of all, of how gardening, however peculiar, can save your life. Once, on one of Michael's leaves, he had taken her over a munition factory, where she saw the progress of a shell from blank-iron to the all but finished article. The real reason was to escape from Robert, the married art dealer she still loves, and from her terrible grief at his having left her. Hassie hopes that the plants beneath the bindweeds will reveal themselves as flowers, but the only way to find out is to renounce the delusion that she can control the world around her.

Reading a few reviews after I’d finish this rather lovely novel I was surprised to see so many negative ones. She paid her bill beside a stolid, plain-featured Englishwoman, who, hearing her inquire about the train to Hagenzeele, volunteered to come with her. It was a joy to read a book where the words were important with an extensive but easily understood vocabulary. The man lifted his eyes and looked at her with infinite compassion before he turned from the fresh-sown grass toward the naked black crosses. The latter person followed the ghost of my young self through to the beamed kitchen and into a cold scullery.We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. Getting over” the loss of someone we love by way of a dramatic change in lifestyle is a familiar pursuit, in theory if not in practice. The novel is set against the backdrop of post-Brexit hostility towards immigrants and people of colour. But the sacred wells were harder to be rid of so these were transferred to the local saints, who then took over the reputation for the working of cures for those who came to be healed by them. Of especial interest, and one which Vickers develops slowly, is the relevance of the mysterious pool in the wood adjacent to Knight’s Fee, and the allegations of the village that Nelly East was weird and believed she had fairies at the bottom of her garden.

During the course of the book, there are some fabulous descriptions of nature – the very act of reading about gardening, flowers, the earth and the wildlife is calming and felt therapeutic to me. It was put down near the Salient, where it led a meritorious and unexacting life, while the Somme was being manufactured; and enjoyed the peace of the Armentières and Laventie sectors when that battle began. Other people urged her to communicate with infallible Secretaries of organizations who could communicate with benevolent neutrals, who could extract accurate information from the most secretive of Hun commandants. Viewed as a whole, though, the novel's narrative design emerges as instrumental to its central conviction, as set out in the prefacing letter: that “the certainties we construct are apt to be toppled by reality. The place was still in the making, and stood some five or six feet above the metalled road, which it flanked for hundreds of yards.Knowing she will need help with the heavy digging required, she employs Murat, an Albanian refugee to help her in the garden. It seems to have an answer to all of life’s great questions and is also an incredible journey through the generations of different families.

Sarah Stewart introduces readers to an engaging and determined young heroine, whose story is told through letters written home, while David Small's illustrations beautifully evoke the Depression-era setting. She disappears inside them like the plants in her new garden, which she discovers to be so “taken over” by bindweed and ground elder that their shapes are no longer discernible. The village knew, too, that George Turrell had tried his family severely since early youth, and were not surprised to be told that, after many fresh starts given and thrown away he, an Inspector of Indian Police, had entangled himself with the daughter of a retired non-commissioned officer, and had died of a fall from a horse a few weeks before his child was born. There are also occasional and pertinent quotations from Housman, Hopkins and Hardy – so there you are, my juvenile hifalutin notions of literature helped me out there. No, there is some semblance of a story as regards Hass settling down, and some indication of a kind of fairy legacy regarding the building and its environs, but nothing that ever gels into the form of a decent story.

It is only really Hassie’s sister, Margot, who is discovered to be more complex than first imagined. She has worked, variously, as a cleaner, a dancer, an artist’s model, a teacher of children with special needs, a university teacher of literature, and a psychoanalyst.