Like an old wives’ tale, like a piece of wisdom passed down through generations which no one questioned of even thought about too hard. Like folklore. It was just something everyone knew, a rule to be followed.
Don’t go to Almanby.

Heather, Rachel and Antonia are going to Almanby.

Heather needs to find her boyfriend who, like so many, went and never came back.

Rachel has a mysterious package to deliver, and her life depends on it.

And Antonia - poor, lovestruck Antonia just wants the chance to spend the day with Heather.

So off they set through the idyllic yet perilous English countryside, in which nature thrives in abundance and summer lasts forever, and as they travel through ever-shifting geography and encounter strange voices in the fizz of shortwave radio, the harder it becomes to tell friend from foe.

Creepy, dreamlike, unsettling and unforgettable - you are about to join the privileged few who come to understand exactly why we don't go to Almanby.

‘Eerily enchanting and profoundly inventive, Adam S. Leslie’s Lost in the Garden is a dreamy and unsettling masterwork written with such care and aplomb. In this perfectly composed and dazzlingly intricate folk horror phantasmagoria, reality becomes infected while a charming and yet deeply sinister strangeness crawls from page to page, chapter to chapter. This is one of the freshest and most spiritually rewarding novels I’ve read in quite some time.’ — Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

Dead Ink, 2024, 336pages.