When her father dies, he leaves her the old suitcase she came off the ship with, which allows her to try to figure out where she came from and who she really is. The revelation shakes her and makes her slip away slowly from her close relations to her family.

It's basically about a little girl, Nell, who shows up in Maryborough, Australia, with no idea about who she is the man who finds her decides to keep her until her parents or caretakers show up, but eventually simply adopts her and pretends she's his own - until she becomes 21 years old and he decides to tell her the truth. I leafed some more, decided that I liked the style of the book, then went ahead and bought it. I leafed through it and came across a page where an annoyingly uptight mother was *giving* her daughter another girl, which she was to train in the proper ways of society, and that's a trope which I could live with. I glanced at the back cover, and noticed that it was the sort of story with three (or more) timelines, one in 1909, another in 1975 and yet another in 2005. To my surprise, it seemed to have a certain warmth about it - which, at a second glance, was actually true: it appeared that, for whatever reason, that particular row of books was placed partly on top of a heater. I walked into a bookshop, thinking, 'I'd like a slow, comfortable, long book.' And as I walked around, dismissing short story collections, classics and fantasy or sci fi novels, I noticed 'The Forgotten Garden' and I picked it up.

The forgotten garden book review