Admin | On May 7, 2013

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Ebook Deal of the Day: Free! “The Illegal Gardener (The Greek Village Series Book 1)” by Sara Alexi

Genre: Literary Fiction

Driven by a need for some control in her life, Juliet sells up on impulse and buys a dilapidated farmhouse in a tiny Greek village, leaving her English life behind.

The house is livable by local standards, but the job of restoring the garden is too big. It requires strength. Juliet cannot bring it to life on her own.

Around the olive tree, hidden beneath the covering of bindweeds, are mattresses, broken chairs, shepherds’ crooks, and old goat bells, the remains of past lives intertwined in a slow decay. The beauty of the garden is lost with the years of neglect and no one to appreciate it.

Juliet reluctantly enlists casual labour. She has no desire to share her world with anyone. The boys have grown, Mick has gone. This is her time now.

Aaman has travelled to Greece from Pakistan illegally. His task is to find work and raise money for the harvester his village desperately needs to deliver them out of poverty. Poverty that is sending the younger generation to the cities, dividing families, and slowly destroying his community.

What he imagined would be a heroic journey in reality is fraught with danger and corruption. He finds himself in Greece and follows the work, a little here, a little there. As time passes, he loses his sense of self. He is now an immigrant worker, illegal, displaced, unwanted, with no value. Some days he does not have enough money to feed himself, let alone to return home to Pakistan.

In the village square, he waits for work, dawn not even broken.

Juliet hires Aaman.

Neither is entirely comfortable with their role. Juliet the Westerner, who has money and a valid passport, resents the intrusion even though she wants her garden cleared. Aaman needs the work and money but resents the humiliation.

As the summer progresses, even though they are from vastly different backgrounds, cultures apart, they discover they have something in common, an event that has defined how they interact and even how they view themselves. Pieces of their lives they have kept hidden even from themselves are exposed. They are each other’s catalysts to facing their own ghosts…