Both women are very different, but drawn to each other through their shared interest in the plants but also perhaps through some instinctive knowledge that each of them were lonely in their own way. Elizabeth is living with relatives she hardly knows, believes she is there through family duty. She has to keep the secret of her unhappy marriage from her husband’s relatives, though more and more is revealed about her life before. Belle is a social outcast, though not without money. The illegitimate child of a peer, she has chosen to live her life as a courtesan, a mistress to two men of wealth. Her position has meant she has never really had friends and she is surprised to find she welcome’s Elizabeth’s company. And those she created are, for the most part, just wonderful. The omniscient narrator, who dips in and out of the minds of many characters – reminiscent of narrators from novels of the Regency era – means that we get to know many characters from the inside out. Elizabeth is a compelling lead, and Belle is a riot, from start to finish. Johann is a dashing hero, easily the equal of any Jane Austen hero and I’d even say surpassing some of them with his gentle, kind ways. If you come to The Fair Botanists for the history, or for the names that you recognise, you should be aware that you will come away having fallen completely in love with Elizabeth, Belle and Johann. Jon tries to understand what has happened to him, and the danger he now seems to present to those who love him. “If I can figure out what he did and how he did it, maybe I can fix it,” he says. Kepnes shifts the narrative between Jon, his only friend, Chloe, who is desperate to find him when he vanishes again, and Detective Charles “Eggs” DeBenedictus, who believes there’s a link to the series of sudden deaths on his beat. Providence is compelling, and Kepnes provides a sometimes piercing insight into the small, strange, sad details that make up a life, though without quite achieving the deep, dark pleasures of You. Brighton,1957: Mirabelle Bevan can’t resist a cry for help, be it the little girl at a seaside sanatorium who is getting bullied or the strange behaviour of Uma, the Indian nurse who is looking after her. Intrigued she soon finds herself drawn into a spider’s web of connections between an upmarket brothel, local priest Father Grogan, a man’s body washed up on Brighton beach and a missing nursing sister. Published: 12:00 PM Lauren Groff on Fates and Furies: ‘I thought it would be interesting to write a book questioning marriage’

The Fair Botanists by Sara Sheridan | Goodreads

I’ve always been an equal rights campaigner. I think writing Where are the Women? in 2018 radicalised me though! I knew many of the stories I told already, even I was blown away by the scale on which we have forgotten female achievement over the centuries simply because we have consistently neglected to properly memorialise it. Inserting over a thousand women’s stories into our real life environment (both rural and urban) was an absolute honour – even if the monuments were mostly imaginary. In Fair Botanists one of the big pleasures was creating a world where women were included, so when someone reaches for a book I made the decision that the writer would be female (and not only Jane Austen, thank you!), if a market gardener were to be consulted, it was a woman, if a song were sung, it was written by a woman. Because it’s not that women didn’t do these things and weren’t known in their own time – it’s only that we’ve forgotten!The Fair Botanists allowed Sheridan to set the story in her hometown of Edinburgh. She spent hours researching the archives at RBGE to glean botanical gems, as well as browsing old maps at the National Library of Scotland to build a realistic picture of how the city might have looked. Perfume is a big part of my world so it was genuinely fun writing directly about that – though there are always smells in my novels, this time I got to the nub of the thing! Recounting this serendipitous sequence of events, Sheridan laughs. "It is the most synchronicity I have ever had in anything," she says.

The Fair Botanists: Sara Sheridan on her new historical novel The Fair Botanists: Sara Sheridan on her new historical novel

Despite all this, I want to carry on, in memory of my late father. It is the children and young people I especially feel for. Their future is not safe. It is also affecting them psychologically, with many suffering from mental health issues. There is a high dropout rate among the boys at our secondary school. It is similar in many other nearby villages and towns – with Palestinians either evicted or simply leaving, in despair, to live in other countries. The Fair Botanists is set around the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens’ move from Leith Walk to the new larger location at Inverleith in 1822. The main players in the novel all have an interest in the gardens. There’s William McNab, the poorly paid head gardener, and Robert Graham, the regius keeper. However, the story revolves around two women: Elizabeth Rocheid, an impoverished widow newly arrived from London to live with her late husband’s aunt, and Belle Brodie, an independent woman with a passion for perfume creation. Elizabeth, a botanical illustrator offers to make drawings of the plants and their historic move. Added into the mix is Belle Brodie, granddaughter of an aristocrat who is empowering other women through the use of scented oils (what wouldn’t she give to see what that agave smells like?) and Mhairi, a blind woman who is a whizz at whisky blending and might just be able to help Belle out. Ta. But naw.” Mhairi has broken her fast with a bowl of porridge, a dollop of cream and two glasses of milk.’Doha Asous is an olive farmer from a village near Nablus in the occupied West Bank. She is in Britain for Fairtrade Fortnight to talk about agriculture in Palestine and to promote local produce – olives and their oil, as well as other typical foods, such as dates. Here she describes life in her village during the recent violence between Palestinian locals and Jewish settlers. Her first book, Truth or Dare, featured in the Sunday Times Top 50 and was nominated for the Saltire Prize. In 2015 Sara was named one of the Saltire Society’s 365 most influential Scottish women, past and present. She sits on the Committee of the Society of Authors in Scotland and is also on the board of the UK-wide writers’ collective ‘26’, taking part in the acclaimed 26 Treasures project in 2010 at the V&A, in 2011 at National Museum of Scotland and in 2012 at the Children’s Museum, Bethnal Green.