The Allotment

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.

The soil remembers. The soil keeps score.

The Aylesbury New Town Allotment Association has been tending the same ground since 1977. The ground itself has been under cultivation for three hundred years. The soil is exceptional: deep, rich, productive in ways that defy explanation. New tenants always settle in quickly. They eat what the plot produces. They attend the Sunday meetings. They stay.

Maya Kapoor takes on Plot Seventeen because she needs something to do with her hands while she finishes her PhD thesis — something real, something with visible results. What she finds is a community that is almost too welcoming, a plot that produces food unlike anything she has tasted before, and a body of changes happening beneath her skin that she attributes, for as long as she possibly can, to fresh air and purpose.

The Allotment is folk horror rooted in the ordinary: a market town, a PhD deadline, a neighbour who keeps inviting you to things. The horror is not what comes from outside. It is what grows in, from the first mouthful.

Dark, accumulative, and relentlessly mundane in its menace. For readers of Andrew Michael Hurley, Adam Nevill, and Thomas Tryon's Harvest Home.