The Secrets of Greystone House by Marcus Attwater

I saw none of this when I stayed here that summer. Inside, the main staircase is impressive, but the backstairs have an inconvenient twist in them the first floor passage goes around more corners than seems necessary, as if the architect wasn’t quite sure how to dispose of the bedrooms and reaching the guest rooms on the attic floor involves travelling through the servants’ part of the house. It is not an especially graceful or well-proportioned building, just a bit too tall for its width and giving the impression that it has been haphazardly assembled of all the pieces the owner thought should go into a rich man’s house: a porticoed front door, bay windows, terraces, a conservatory. The house is late Victorian, built for the founder of Hambleton’s, the toffee manufacturers, in 1890. The sycamore has outgrown the lawn and towers threateningly over the house, the ivy covers more of the grey stone. The garden is looking a bit rough around the edges now. It is a large house, a house which announces itself to the world, and if it spoke louder to me as a boy than it does to me now, it is still the same Greystone: sitting foursquare in the garden, with its smooth lawns and yew hedges and yes, even with the big urns filled with geraniums either side of the front door steps. But I know this must be it, and as I continue down the drive an earlier perspective reasserts itself. In my memory Greystone House is more imposing, more extravagant in its collection of gables and chimneys and outbuildings. 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.I walk through the gates of 22 Andover Lane, and for a moment I wonder if I have come to the right place. To visit the past or the future, even in imagination, is to change it. 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. 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. When 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.

The Secrets of Greystone House by Marcus Attwater