The Last Garden

‘Dog Boy is a wonderful novel, a tour de force.’ – John Burnside * Guardian UK *
‘Hornung writes with extraordinary force and insight…an amazing feat of imaginative power.’ * Canberra Times *
‘There’s human violence and the strength of animals…just gripping.’ * Australian *
‘Vivid, visceral and disconcerting. The descriptions of animals are intensely empathetic, and the book raises fundamental and confronting questions about how our animal and our human selves can or should co-exist.’ * Books + Publishing *
‘Eight years after the magical, Prime Minister’s Literary Award-winning Dog Boy, what a joy it is to have another beautifully-wrought novel by Adelaide author Eva Hornung.’ * Adelaide Advertiser *
‘Like all great literary fiction, The Last Garden provokes thought and empathy in equal measure. This visceral and utterly compelling new novel represents an ambitious new layer to Hornung’s continued investigation of the human condition, magnificently realised.’ * Readings *
‘This is a novel that is calm and patient in its telling, and almost hypnotic in its effect. What Hornung emphasises is that it’s neither our hopes for the future, nor the suffering of our pasts, that saves us. Rather, it’s in the act of living—the way we attune ourselves to the shifting demands of the world around us; the use we make of the time between “the first garden … and the last”—that redemption is to be found.’ * Australian *
‘It’s melancholy, beautiful, and deeply evocative. Michael Cathcart admitted to the writer that he knew he was going to love it from page one.’ * Michael Cathcart, Radio National *
‘Eva Hornung understands how critical human relationships with animals can be.’ * Guardian *
‘Yes, there are grotesque and sinister surprises aplenty in this weird prodigy of a book, but there is a lot of tenderness and an extraordinary beauty too.’ * Saturday Paper *
‘Melancholy, beautiful, and deeply evocative.’ * RN Books and Arts *
‘Full of symbolism but not overpowered by it, this is a powerful book, and the writing is mesmerising.’ * Herald Sun *
‘The Last Garden is by no means a long read but it is a big novel. Hornung’s characters, in all their awed complexity, will stay with you long after the covers of this powerful book are closed.’ * Australian Book Review *
‘Hornung’s knowledge and deep respect for the spiritual and emotional relationships between humans and animals shine through in her exquisite, glittering prose. This gentle, literary novel is a moving meditation on the heavy mist of grief, and will bring back a dark solace to the tormented heart.’ * Big Issue *
‘Hornung is a writer of extraordinary power, using her omniscient narrator to inhabit the minds of Benedict’s father, the grieving child and the faltering pastor, following the flux of their thoughts with elegance and precision…An unusual and hypnotic novel.’ * Age *
‘A cut black gem of a book: beautiful, compact, and sinister.’ * Andrew Fuhrmann, Best Books of 2017, Australian Book Review *
‘Deep despair was cushioned by gorgeous writing in Eva Hornung’s The Last Garden.’ * Bram Presser, Sydney Morning Herald’s Year in Reading *
‘In luminous prose Hornung paints a closed religious community awaiting the overdue coming of their Messiah and a violently orphaned boy tutored by nature.’
* Favourite Books of the Year *
‘Hornung has given an allegory for the modern world…Genuine feeling for others is so much more important than adhering to doctrine. In this novel, when the lessons are learned, the Garden of Eden can have a different ending.’ * Newtown Review of Books *
‘An extraordinarily powerful, unsettling and at times deeply moving tale.’ * Sydney Review of Books *
‘Harrowing reading, yet it’s beautiful too. An extraordinary novel.’ * ANZ LitLovers *

Eva Hornung, formerly published as Eva Sallis, is an award-winning writer of literary fiction and criticism.

Her first novel, Hiam, won the Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 1997 and the Nita May Dobbie Award in 1999. Her novel The Marsh Birds won the Asher Literary Award in 2005 and was shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year 2005, the NSW Premier’s Literary Award, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Hornung’s acclaimed novel Dog Boy was shortlisted for numerous prizes and won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award in 2010. The Last Garden won the SA Premier’s Prize for Literature in 2018.

She lives in rural South Australia.

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