It's 1969. High overhead, a man is preparing to walk on the moon. Down here in the valley, things are much more interesting.
Distrust and arrogance are alive and well in the timeless bones and living stones of this close Welsh community, and the pagan ancestors aren't as far in the past as people might think. It only takes a very small dog to inflame a slumbering beast...
Suspiciously long-lived matriarch Lizzie Coombe expects her one hundredth birthday to be a day to remember. She's always kept aloof from the neighbours... hasn't spoken to some for over 50 years... and cares even less for their opinions. But what has that got to do with anything? A stuffy little party: that should be the highlight of the day.
But Reverent Morgan, latest in a long line of Morgan vicars at the tiny village chapel, is affronted by events. And he finds a ready audience for his complaints; gossip is gossip, after all. What follows will never be forgotten by any of them.
Jumbled together inside the haunted stone walls of the ancestral farmhouse, aristocratic Lizzie and her stolid daughter Myfanwy only know old love from long-dead sweethearts. Lizzie's unstable granddaughter Sarah Maud is frightened of it. Great granddaughter Jenner doesn't seem to need love at all; is she really a wise woman, or a witch? Who knows where the fey child's self-taught morality has taken her...
As events and people spiral out of her accustomed control, Lizzie faces her own ghosts and sees she might have to do the unthinkable: care for her family; or accept the unimaginable: that her family don't care for her.
An immersive novel, Red Gifts in the Garden of Stones looks at alienation and belonging, dysfunction and healing, tradition and change: the impacts of love and tragedy on the generations. And holding them all, the ancient landscape of South Wales.
