The Forgotten Garden

I loved this novel. I couldn't put it down. Told from the perspectives of several different characters across three distant decades and two countries, it was a beautifully spun tale of long-lost family. In 1913, Nell was found alone on a ship to Australia at age 4, and a family takes her into their home as their own child. But who is her true family? And why has no one tried to find her? The father that raised her finally admits on her 18th birthday that she was not their own, and she spends the rest of her life trying to uncover the tangled truth about her origins. Nell purchases a cliff-side cottage and its walled-in “magical garden,” where she is convinced she used to play as a child, but circumstances prevent her from a permanent move, and she dies before she can uncover all the cottage's secrets. Her granddaughter Cassandra is willed the house, and sets off to find out who her ancestors are once and for all.