The Forgotten Garden is an absorbing, beautiful story of regrowth, regeneration and hope.

Luisa is working in a job where she barely utilises her talents and any skills she has to offer, her boss takes credit for. When an opportunity arises to use her skills & enthusiasm to build a community garden from waste land she decides to take the bull by it’s horns and do it! She is met with reticence and even threats from the local youth and the wider community. However when Cas, a local teacher who singlehandedly funds & runs a gym / youth club next door to the waste land, gets on board the scene begins to change as he persuades some of his students to help.

The story flows well as we see changes in the garden and all it’s volunteers arise. The hope and the plant life flourish. The darker side of life for one talented teen, Harper, is also explored as she juggles caring for her young brother, school work, a job and her own community service as well as a drunken father and no good parolee cousin.

I couldn’t put this book down. Sharon Gosling has done it again with a superb story full of hope and fellowship. I thoroughly recommend this truly uplifting book.

Louisa is in a job she hates after her husband and she abandons the career she wanted. Until her husbands godfather gives her the chance to go back to doing garden design. Lovely book and different as it describes all of the different ways to get a rundown piece of ground into a lovely area for people to enjoy

I really enjoyed this. Gosling is a very competent writer, which is always reassuring, I think. It's so nice to read something by someone who knows what they're doing.

There are some lovely descriptions in this, especially of plants and gardening - which I always enjoy in fiction. And I think she writes 'community' really nicely - as in her previous novel, The Lighthouse Bookshop, it is indeed 'the friendships we made along the way' that are important in everyone's journeys in The Forgotten Garden. (The title made me think it would be about the rediscovering of an existing garden, btw, and it totally isn't, but whatever.)

Luisa has been barely doing more than existing since the death of her husband. Given the opportunity to develop a community garden in a run down little town on the Cumbrian coast, she doesn't exactly leap at the chance. Once she sees the site, though, and seeing as how she's just lost her job (her boss is a genuinely unpleasant creation, I was relieved to see the back of her) she may as well get on with it, right? There's a good mixture of characters here, from originally hostile but slowly thawing neighbours to the scrappy kids who hang out at the gym across from the garden site. This is run by Cas, who also teaches at the local school and tries to make a difference to teenagers who are flailing in a place that seems to have been left behind. He's quite handsome, which Luisa is determined to ignore. One of his troubled teens is Harper, mechanical genius with an autistic brother, an alcoholic dad, and a lot of attitude. She's a properly great character, I'd read another book about her. It's Harper's life, which teeters riskily on the edge of colleapse and despair, that drives the more dramatic elements of the story. (Some of it's really quite tense.)

Can Luisa make a garden here? Can Harper stay in school? Can Luisa move on from the anguish of her husband's death? Will her sister get a good frock for her wedding? Will Cas and Luisa ever be more than friends? The answers to these questions are perhaps not unexpected but the story is very enjoyable. Recommended.

Sharon Gosling is a writer of both children’s and adult fiction. I have read and immensely enjoyed her first two adult novels, both of which were set in Scotland. This new book is set in the north west of England and, as with the previous two novels, features a woman struggling to find her way in the world.

The story centres on Luisa MacGregor, who is still grieving for the husband who died in a tragic accident many years ago. She is unhappy stuck working in a job where she can’t fully use her undoubted talents as a landscape gardener and is taken for granted by her boss. When she is thrown a lifeline in the shape of a piece of land that once contained a factory and that she can develop as a community garden, she grabs it and begins a project that was originally dreamt up by her husband. In the small rundown seaside town of Collaton, she is helped in her efforts by local teacher Cas and reluctant teenager Harley. Even with their help, all is not plain sailing. However, bit by bit, she involves the initially resistant community in her project to turn the derelict plot into a thriving garden filled with colour and bounty. In the process, she also begins to come back to life herself and may even have found love once again.

I very much enjoyed this well-written and moving book and would definitely recommend it. The characters were all believable, even if I did not like some of them; I think that those guys will be obvious if you read the book. I was drawn to Luisa and admired her courage in starting a project with little initial support, wishing to fulfil her late husband’s dream. She had many obstacles to overcome and their were some tear-jerking moments in her story. However, to watch as things literally grew and the community came together was truly heartwarming. In my opinion, this is another triumph from this author and I shall be looking out for her next book.