Arrow Garden

Winner of the Bath Novel Award 2020When lonely and socially isolated translator, Gareth, takes up traditional Japanese archery in 1990s Bristol, he learns that to study Kyudo is to reach out, to another culture, another time, other people But when one of them reaches back, two lives that should never have touched become strangely entangled. In wartime Tokyo, Tanaka Mie finds herself wandering the burned-out ruins of her dead parents' fire-bombed home with only hazy recollections of how she survived. Setting out on a hike to a mountain village shrine, away from the charred city, she begins a life to which she is not sure she is entitled, a life which feels like living on the other side of the sky. To visit the past or the future, even in imagination, is to change it. But it is also to be changed. The Arrow Garden is a delicately-wrought tale of truth, selfhood, and acceptance, which transcends time in its lyrical exploration of what it means to live.