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Almost twenty years after forbidding him to contact her, Vita receives an email from Royce. Once, he was her benefactor and she was one of his brightest protégé. Now Royce is ailing and Vita's career has stalled, and both have a need to settle accounts. Beyond their shared, murky history, both have lost beloveds, one to a strange disappearance, another to an untimely death. And both are trying to free themselves from deeper pasts - Vita from the inheritance of her birthplace, Royce from the bodies that lie in the ancient city of Pompeii, and the secrets of the Garden of the Fugitives. Between what's been repressed and what has been excavated are disturbances that reach back through decades, even centuries. Profoundly addictive and unsettling, In the Garden of the Fugitives is a masterpiece of duplicity and counterplay, as brilliantly illuminating as it is surprising - about the obscure workings of guilt in the human psyche, the compulsion to create and control, and the dangerous morphing of desire into obsession. It is the breakthrough work of one of Australia's most exciting emerging writers.