The Good-Hearted Gardeners
Author(s): Suniti Namjoshi
What do you do when you fall in love with your next-door neighbour? You peer at each other through a hole in the fence and eventually climb over.
Sybil is a member of The Good-Hearted Gardeners, a Society for Well-Meaning Efforts for the Betterment of Language and the Salvation of the Planet, which her lover, Demo, is allowed to join. It’s funded by MI5, who ask them to monetise and weaponise the English language. Soon afterwards they discover that English is even more widespread than anyone had thought. Even the birds and the fish, the cows and the kangaroos can speak it – when they choose. The Good-Hearted Gardeners set about trying to talk to anyone – crows, magpies, robins, goldfish, cows, horses, rats, mice – who will talk to them.
With climate change and technology gone mad, what’s in store is a frightening scenario that threatens everyone – humans, animals, plants. Can the headlong rush to extinction be halted?
When the birds, and the cows and the horses and the mice and all the rest come together, much is made possible. But at what cost? Will the planet and its inhabitants be saved?
Product Information
Suniti Namjoshi was born in Mumbai, India. She has worked as an Officer in the Indian Administrative Service and in academic posts in India and Canada. From 1972 to 1988, she taught in the Department of English at the University of Toronto and now lives and writes in Devon, England.
She has published numerous poems, fables and reviews: in anthologies, collections and literary and Women's Studies journals, in India, Canada, the US and Britain. She has published several books of poetry including The Authentic Lie (1982) and From the Book of Nightmares (1984). Feminist Fables (1981), was reissued by Spinifex Press (1993) and Virago (1994). Her other books include The Conversations of Cow and The Mothers of Maya Diip. Spinifex published St Suniti and the Dragon, Building Babel and Goja.
Sycorax: New Fables and Poems was published by Penguin, India in 2006. She is also the author of a dozen children’s books in the Aditi series published by Tulika Publishers, Chennai.
In 2023 she was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
General Fields
- :
- : Spinifex Press
- : Spinifex Press
- : 01 November 2023
- : books
Special Fields
- : Suniti Namjoshi
