Tbr: The Language of Flowers

 

    Here's a book about which there has been considerable 'buzz' for some months. A first novel which was the subject of fierce bidding by nine publishers here - Macmillan eventually scooped it, and it will lead their fiction list this year - Vanessa Diffenbaugh's The Language of Flowers is much anticipated and is being published in 31 countries, but its origins lie in a copy of Kate Greenaway's Language of Flowers which Vanessa discovered in a second-hand bookshop when she was just 16.

    That find sparked an enduring interest in the charming custom, especially popular in Victorian times, of attributing meanings or sentiments to flowers so that a single bloom or more elaborate bouquet could convey a message. In writing the novel, Vanessa consulted several 19th. century handbooks on the subject, and she has compiled her own floral dictionary which you'll find towards the back of the book (cornflower or centaurea cyanus is listed there under its American name, Bachelor's button, its meaning, 'single blessedness').

    But this is a contemporary story whose heroine Victoria has been brought up in a series of foster homes. Isolated and damaged, her passion is for flowers and their meanings, and it is that which eventually leads her to the possibility of love, revealing along the way the secret she is hiding and why it is that flowers mean so much.

    "Real literary quality combined with a page-turning and deeply moving plot"; all that and flowers, too - I can't wait!