Fundamentally a memoir of the author's own life through her gardens, it tells of her family home in Cairo where she spent most of her childhood, her grandmother's garden in a sloping Somerset field, then two successive Oxfordshire gardens of her own and the smaller urban garden in the North London home she lives in today.

She tells us how gardens have inspired her. There are details about the writing process and the books which have influenced her throughout her life, and she explores why writers might be drawn to gardening. She recalls gardens in literature, from Paradise Lost to Alice in Wonderland, and of writers and their gardens, from Virginia Woolf to Philip Larkin.

It's a wonderful book - one to rattle through in one sitting, but also to stop and ponder with each chapter. Either way it is a book to return to again and again.

Read my interview with Penelope Lively here.