In the Garden of the Fugitives
Location(s): Pompeii
Genre(s): Fiction
Era(s): Modern
‘It has been almost fifteen years. I’ve thought about you often, mostly unkindly. But there: I have thought about you.’
Nearly twenty years after Vita broke off contact with Royce, he writes to her, determined to excavate the past. He is older than her, a ghost from her university days, a former benefactor she has tried hard to forget. In his own youth, Royce spent two fateful summers working on a dig in Pompeii with a woman he would later memorialize with a scholarship – the same one that Vita eventually received.
From opposite sides of the world, Royce and Vita enter into an adversarial dance: an attempt to settle old accounts. Profoundly addictive and unsettling, In the Garden of the Fugitives is a thrilling psychological examination of what happens when the lines are blurred between victim and predator, between loyalty and obsession.
