The Garden of Resurrection: Being the Love Story of an Ugly Man

In a London park, a man sits and watches the world pass by, cataloguing everything he cannot have. He is not handsome. He knows this. Has made his peace with it, or so he tells himself, in the quiet hours when the nursemaids laugh together and artisans carry flowers to lovers and he remains, somehow, outside it all. He calls himself an ugly devil with a wry, defeated honesty that cuts deeper than self-pity. Then Clarissa arrives, and everything he believed about his own heart becomes uncertain. This is not a simple romance. It is a novel about the terrible mathematics of longing: what happens when the thing you want most in the world feels like the one thing you deserve least. Temple Thurston writes with a poet's precision about loneliness that feels almost physical, and the way one person can become a mirror for all our secret convictions about our own worth. A hundred years old, and it still hurts in exactly the right ways.