The Statuary Gardens [Abeille, Jacques]

Author: Jacques Abeille

A haunting sci-fi fantasy about a world where women are hidden away, men cultivate living statues, and a there is a mysterious rebellion on the rise, now in English for the first time.

In an unnamed country where the men cultivate statues and the women are nowhere to be seen, a traveler takes a room at an inn. One foggy morning, a mysterious man invites him to take him on a tour of the walled estates, introducing him to the gardeners' rich, strange culture. But as time wears on--and the traveler's landlord pours scorn upon the gardens and gardeners--he feels compelled to set out through ruined estates and depopulated wilderness, to the northern steppes, where a renegade chieftain is said to have rallied the violent nomadic hordes to his cause. But what is this cause? And will this world of men, which has sealed women away behind walls within walls, survive the injustice eating away at its roots?

A cult novel in France, The Statuary Gardens is the first book in Jacques Abeille's multivolume series Cycle des Contrées. A tale of science fiction and high adventure, it is at the same time a meditation on art, culture, inattention, and patriarchy which bears comparison with its influences-- Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, Ernst Jünger, Dino Buzzati--as well as with other world-building works of art, such as Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books or the films of Hayao Miyazaki.

This is the first time Abeille's work has appeared in English.

Publisher: Penguin Random House
Published: 12/08/2026
Pages: 400
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.05oz
ISBN: 9798896230649

About the Author
Jacques Abeille (1942-2022) was born in Lyon, France, the child of two parents married to other people. His father, Valentin, a member of the French Resistance, arranged for false papers (it was, in those days, impossible for parents to claim custody of children born out of wedlock) and cared for him until he was killed in action in 1944. Abeille was then adopted by his father's identical twin brother, a high-ranking civil servant who moved him to Guadeloupe and eventually settled in Bordeaux, where the teenage Abeille briefly corresponded with André Breton. Having studied ethnology, psychology, and philosophy--which he taught for ten years--Abeille became an art teacher. He spoke of his life as a "banal provincial instructor" and family man as a way of triumphing over the eccentricity of his upbringing, though he always felt "the need to cultivate a secret garden," which, after he abandoned painting in the 1970s, was literature. He first published erotica under the pseudonym Bartleby, meanwhile composing The Statuary Gardens, which, after a series of vicissitudes--the bankruptcy of one publisher, the loss of the only surviving typescript, the miraculous rediscovery of a copy--was published in 1982. It was the first in what would become a ten-volume series called the Cycle des Contrées--an epic of interlocking imaginary worlds.

Alex Andriesse is an editor at New York Review Books. He has translated, in addition to three volumes of Memoirs from Beyond the Grave (a final volume is forthcoming from NYRB Classics), Cristina Campo's The Unforgivable and Other Writings, Jacques Dupin's Notched, and Jean-Pierre Martinet's With Their Hearts in Their Boots.

Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection A Collapse of Horses and the novella The Warren. He has also recently published Windeye and Immobility, both of which were finalists for a Shirley Jackson Award. His novel Last Days won the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. His novel The Open Curtain was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, and several other writers. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Critical Studies Program at CalArts.