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Cover of The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

The Garden of Evening Mists

  • 352 pages · about 6 hours
  • First published 2011
  • 15 editions

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1 About this book

On a mountain above the clouds, in the central highlands of Malaya lived the man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan.”

Teoh Yun Ling was seventeen years old when she first heard about him, but a war would come, and a decade would pass before she travels up to the Garden of Evening Mists to see him, in 1951. A survivor of a brutal Japanese camp, she has spent the last few years helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals. Despite her hatred of the Japanese, she asks the gardener, Nakamura Aritomo, to create a memorial garden for her sister who died in the camp. He refuses, but agrees to accept Yun Ling as his apprentice ‘until the monsoon’ so she can design a garden herself.

Staying at the home of Magnus Pretorius, the owner of Majuba Tea Estate and a veteran of the Boer War, Yun Ling begins working in the Garden of Evening Mists. But outside in the surrounding jungles another war is raging.

  • Relationships
  • Literary fiction
  • Gardens
  • Guerrilla warfare
  • Prisoners of war
  • Gardeners
  • Malaysia

2 About Tan Twan Eng

Born 1972

Tan Twan Eng (Chinese: 陳團英; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Tân Thoân-eng; b. 1972) is a Malaysian novelist who writes in English. He published his first novel, The Gift of Rain, in 2007. He is best known for his 2012 book The Garden of Evening Mists which won the Man Asian Literary Prize and Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, making Tan the first Malaysian to be recognised by all three awards.

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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