The Statuary Gardens

A haunting sci-fi fantasy about a world where women are hidden away, men cultivate living statues, and a there is a mysterious rebellion on the rise, now in English for the first time.

In an unnamed country where the men cultivate statues and the women are nowhere to be seen, a traveler takes a room at an inn. One foggy morning, a mysterious man invites him to take him on a tour of the walled estates, introducing him to the gardeners’ rich, strange culture. But as time wears on—and the traveler’s landlord pours scorn upon the gardens and gardeners—he feels compelled to set out through ruined estates and depopulated wilderness, to the northern steppes, where a renegade chieftain is said to have rallied the violent nomadic hordes to his cause. But what is this cause? And will this world of men, which has sealed women away behind walls within walls, survive the injustice eating away at its roots?

A cult novel in France, The Statuary Gardens is the first book in Jacques Abeille’s multivolume series Cycle des Contrées. A tale of science fiction and high adventure, it is at the same time a meditation on art, culture, inattention, and patriarchy which bears comparison with its influences— Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, Ernst Jünger, Dino Buzzati—as well as with other world-building works of art, such as Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea books or the films of Hayao Miyazaki.

This is the first time Abeille’s work has appeared in English.