“The Garden”

Clare Beams

Doubleday, $28

Bodily autonomy, IVF and a woman’s right to choose are all highly charged and divisive topics in our current zero-sum political climate. These incredibly personal issues have sadly become public fodder, and deeply difficult decisions that should be given the respect of privacy have been weaponized and turned into talking points by disingenuous politicians and callous members of the media class.

It’s in this contemporary zone of horror that Clare Beams has taken the themes for her latest unsettling work of fiction. As in her previous novel, “The Illness Lesson,” Beams bends the tropes of historical and gothic fiction in “The Garden” to put real human faces to those issues facing women and their families that have unconscionably been made abstract and distorted.

The year is 1948 and Irene Willard, who is strong-willed, inquisitive and sometimes quite unkind to others, has arrived at a private medical clinic run by a husband and wife team of doctors specializing in fertility. Irene has suffered multiple miscarriages. The clinic is her last hope. Here she will find a community of women who share her experiences as well as a dense thicket of the doctors’ family secrets, ghosts, possible miracles and a creepy, abandoned garden that is both disturbing and a place of hope. Beams excels at this sort of thing, a novel of ideas that complicates the reader’s perceptions and makes your skin crawl.

“A Pandemic Gardening Journal”

Matt Puchalski

Conover Lane, $9.99

Matt Puchalski purchased his house in Lawrenceville right before the pandemic hit in 2020. In the new reality of social distancing, Puchalski turned his attention to the raggedy patch of land his new home sat upon. “At a time when people were disinfecting groceries for fear of the unknown, I’d sit and ponder how I could improve my workspace and backyard,” he writes.

“A Pandemic Gardening Journal” is a meditation on how we come to know the places we inhabit and give something back to this world even in times of great uncertainty and upheaval. Puchalski is chatty and good with a one-liner, which makes him very pleasant company down in the dirt.

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