Night Gardener of St. Edda

When Ros Wylder takes a job as the churchyard gardener in the small Dorset village of St. Edda, she expects drainage problems and difficult yews — not a decades-old conspiracy buried beneath the headstones.A displaced memorial slab discovered during routine maintenance leads Ros into the churchyard's hidden history: graves that have been quietly moved, parish records that don't match the ground, and a pattern of deliberate concealment stretching back to the 1960s. At the centre of the mystery is the Tilney family — Arthur, Margaret, and their son Edward — buried in the same row but carefully separated, the evidence of their connection erased by a rector who decided some truths were better left underground.With the help of Callan, a stonemason haunted by his late father's role in moving the stones, and Lorna, a local historian who has spent years chasing the same family's silenced story, Ros assembles a dossier of evidence that reveals a history of domestic violence, suspicious deaths, and institutional complicity. But the village isn't ready for what she's found. A parish council proposal threatens to lock down the records, and the people who buried the truth aren't all in the ground.The Night Gardener of St. Edda is a quiet, meticulously observed literary novel about landscape, memory, and the stories that places hold when people refuse to tell them. It is a book about the moral weight of paying attention — to the ground beneath your feet, to the dead who can't speak for themselves, and to the slow, painstaking work of making a wrong thing right.