EL JARDIN OLVIDADO / KATE MORTON

El jardín olvidado de Kate Morton

Una niña abandonada en un embarcadero un año antes del estallido de la  Primera Guerra Mundial; la revelación a una joven del secreto sobre du verdadera ascendencia; la herencia de una espléndida y misteriosa finca en la agreste costa de Cornualles...

Estos son los puntos de partida de una historia que evoca la gran novela victoriana, los cuentos de hadas y los relatos de intriga. Puntos de partida que configurarán una encantadora novela en la que conoceremos a Rose, Eliza, Nell y Cassandra, con Australia y Cornualles  como escenarios, y unas vidas que transcurren desde principios del siglo XX (1913) hasta la actualidad, en el siglo XXI. 

Nell no conoce sus orígenes y  a pesar de sus intentos por lograr averiguar la verdad sobre su procedencia, será su nieta Cassandra quien lo consiga y por lo tanto puede terminar el puzzle de la vida de su abuela.

No es una novela empalagosa, dulzona ni romántica.

Podemos encontrar en esta obra ecos de Bradbury, Maupassant, e incluso de Kazuo Ishiguro, autor de Lo que queda del día, una de mis películas preferidas (The Remains of the Day)

Por cierto, si os gusta ver películas en versión original, no dejéis de verla  ó recomendarla a quienes conozcáis alrededor que quieran mejorar su inglés. El inglés de los personajes es ..... bueníiisimo.

Debajo de la fotografía que pongo a continuación dejo un vídeo donde la autora presenta la novela. 

He dejado debajo la transcripción de las palabras de Kate Morton porque me parece muy buena para practicar un poco la comprensión oral (el 'listening')

Espero que le sirva a alguien. 
(La receta de la tarta de setas, en Comer Guapamente)

In a walled garden, locked and abandoned for a hundred years, a dark secret stirs.

Hi! I'm Kate Morton, author of The House at Riverton, which won the Richard and Judy Summer Read Award last year and I am delighted to take this opportunity to tell you a little bit about my new book, The Forgotten Garden.

The Forgotten Garden starts on the eve of the First World War, when a little girl is found sitting on top of a suitcase on an empty wharf.

A mysterious woman she knows only as The Authoress has promised to take care of her, but the Authoress has disappeared without a trace.

Almost a century later, a young Australian woman called Cassandra comes into an unexpeceted inheritance.

Cliff Cottage and its forgotten garden in the grounds of the strange and beautiful Blackhurst Manor and notorious amongst the Cornish locals for the secrets they hold, secrets about the doomed Mountrachet family and their ward Eliza Makepiece, a writer of dark Victorian fairy tales.

But it is in a cliff cottage that Cassandra will finally uncover the truth about the family and solve the century old mistery of a little girl lost.

I absolutely loved writing The Forgotten Garden. It was such a pleasure to disappear inside my very own cottage, high on a Cornish cliff top and to discover the secrets and misteries concealed in its hidden garden, locked and abandoned for a hundred years.

I drew on a lot of personal inspiration when I wrote The Forgotten Garden. Just like one of my characters, on the night for her twenty-first birthday,  my grandmother found out she wasn't really who she thought she was.

This secret so affected her that she didn't tell another soul until she was an old lady and finally confided in her three grown-up`daughters. I was always fascinated by the story and I wondered how a person  might  go about putting back togeteher the pieces of her life.

I was also told lots of stories of family members migrating to Australia from Europe. One day, as I listened to such stories, I had an image from nowhere of a little girl sitting on top of a small white suitcase on a deserted wharf.

Who was she? Where had she come from and why was she alone? And what future awaited her if she couldn't remember any of these things and in no one from her past came looking for her?

I even wrote my own house into The Forgotten Garden. The house that I live in is one that I found myself bidding for auction quite unexpectedly. There was something about the tumbledown weatherboard house that I found compulsive. Tucked into the Paddington Hillside, hunkering down behind the huge antique centre on the ridge, the house looked like the kind of place that has witnessed a lot of secrets.

It was also the perfect location for my character, a second-hand dealer, with a lot of secrets and misteries of her own to live.

Along with such personal inspiration, I couldn't help but draw on a few of my favourite things: there's an English country estate called Blackhurse, darker than Riverton, perched on a clifftop on the Cornish coast. There's an abandoned cottage with a chequered past, and there's a hidden garden sealed up and forgotten for almost a hundred years, all the ingredients to keep you feverlishly turning pages long after the light should be out.

I hope you enjoy getting lost in The Forgotten Garden.