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Book Reviewed by:The Seed Collectors is a tale of inheritance, enlightenment, life, death, desire and family trees by a literary star in the UK.
Great Aunt Oleander is dead. To each of her nearest and dearest she has left a seed pod. The seed pods might be deadly, but then again they might also contain the secret of enlightenment. Not that anyone has much time for enlightenment. Fleur, left behind at the crumbling Namaste House, must step into Oleander's role as guru to lost and lonely celebrities. Bryony wants to lose the weight she put on after her botanist parents disappeared, but can't stop drinking. And Charlie struggles to make sense of his life after losing the one woman he could truly love.
A complex and fiercely contemporary tale of inheritance, enlightenment, life, death, desire and family trees, The Seed Collectors is the most important novel yet from one of the world's most daring and brilliant writers. As Henry James said of George Eliot's Middlemarch, The Seed Collectors is a 'treasurehouse of detail' revealing all that it means to be connected, to be part of a society, to be part of the universe and to be human.
Besides the sex, the book abounds with discussions of enlightenment, spiritual philosophy and ponderings on the nature of life and karma — much is tongue-in-cheek, making fun of "touchy-feely" interpersonal self-discovery groups, people who follow gurus, and those seeking a brand of convenient enlightenment, but there is an element of earnestness as well, including philosophical discussions on the topic of love and forgiveness. I recommend The Seed Collectors to mature readers who enjoy eccentric and complex family stories and are not put off by an abundance of X-rated sexual content...continued
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(Reviewed by Sharry Wright).
Each of the main characters in The Seed Collectors inherits a seed pod from a rare orchid, and these play a key role in the story.
People have been fascinated with orchids since the time of the Victorians, devoting much energy and resources to raising the myriad variety of these admired beauties. Between 1838 and 1910, orchid hunters traveled the world in search of exotic varieties bringing back shipments sometimes worth up to $80,000. Orchids have been around much longer than people — they've lived on earth for at least ten to fifteen million years. (Although some research indicates that orchids could be as old as one hundred and twenty million years, placing them on earth before the continents split!)
Orchids are the largest ...
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Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you
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Matt Haig
Scarlett Thomas is one of my favourite writers ever and The Seed Collectors might be her best yet. She fuses the comically everyday with a far-out botanical adventure in ways which are brutally funny and profound all at once. Barbed, casually genius, philosophical and intensely readable. A joy.
