At the heart of this is colonialism, with all its horrors. This is the summation of colonialism in the novel: I was drawn into this story from the very beginning – I loved the way that the fictional Tremaynes were insinuated into the family history of the real Tremayne family that used to live at Heligan – but even if I hadn’t known that very real place, where the lost gardens are open to visitors, I still would have been captivated.

As a reader, it felt like Pulley’s research into Peru - not just the country and the layout/scenery, but also the history and language - was very extensive and it really showed throughout her writing. I nodded. He could have. But it felt good to have stood in front of him without flinching and, however stupid it was, I wanted to do it again. To write more detail of the story may spoil it for a first-time reader. Everything in this finely crafted world makes its own perfect sense. There’s magic in this place, and mystery. There is also the brief appearance of one character from ‘The Watchmaker of Filigree Street’.

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Conflicted in almost every way. Its pace, its subject matter, its characters--all of these facets have both lots of positive points in their favor but yet almost as many strikes against them. The writing is very good; descriptive without being exhausting, beautiful without turning purple. I enjoyed the writing on its own very much. But the story. The whole pointlessness of the plot did bother me, as there seemed to be no real goal. There was obstacles as they appeared, but no real drive behind the story to hold the interest. I can’t really review this book without keeping the The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, Natasha Pulley’s debut, in mind and I apologies in advance for multiple comparisons between both books which I will be making.

The eagerly anticipated new novel from the author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street - a treacherous quest in the magical landscape of nineteenth-century Peru. This expedition isn’t really about the trees at all, is it? It’s about getting a decent map, for if – when – the army has to go?’Thus begins a slow-paced epic journey. Others have undertaken this journey before and few have survived it. And they were able-bodied men, whereas Tremayne can barely walk. Tremayne and his companion, his former naval colleague, Clements Markham. They are being sent to: He protested that his leg wasn’t up to the trip; he suspected – correctly – that there was more to the trip than he was being told; he knew that others had tried do the same thing and lost their lives in the process; but he was intrigued and he remembered that his father had told him stories about his own travels to that part of the world, and hinted that there were more stories that he couldn’t tell. The novel is also historical fiction because the East India Company did send expeditions to Peru to obtain quinine from the bark of cinchona trees, desperately needed to treat its workers in the East who suffered from malaria. So there is another whole plot concerning the dastardly practices of people trying to bring cuttings of the tree out of Peru and the natives who seek to prevent this First World rip-off of their natural resources. I’m so glad that I did. It was a lovely mixture of the familiar from the first book and the completely different and utterly right for this book; and it was set in the same slightly fanciful but utterly natural past that I wished could have been but that I know probably wasn’t.