The forgotten garden

The Forgotten Garden is a novel by the Australian writer Kate Morton, published in 2008.

Nell is a child on a ship in 1913, a woman who has built a life on a lie she did not know she was living, and finally an old woman following a trail of documents back to England. The novel moves between her search and the earlier lives of the people at the house in Cornwall, including a writer of fairy tales whose book came to Nell as a child, and it moves too between England and Australia across a century. Morton writes the puzzle with a very large cast, and the reader is often ahead of one character and behind another. What the book is finally about is the cost of the secrets families keep and the children who are told nothing.

It followed the author's first novel, and it is one of several of her books built on a family mystery and a house, and the one that made her name with a wide readership.