Meet Me in the Garden

by Nina LaCour

From bestselling author Nina LaCour comes a sweeping family saga that wrestles with themes of self-discovery and love in all forms, inspired by the author's own Creole family

New Orleans, 1944. Odette has always been one of the Honore sisters, glamorous and admired in their Creole community. But while Odette’s older sisters are content to be wives and mothers, Odette has always wanted something else. It is only with her beloved cousin, Delphine, that Odette can tell her secret: she is in love with a woman, and she longs to be an artist. Delphine has a secret lover, too, a white man. In the hidden garden they’ve discovered, Odette and Delphine can dream of futures full of passion and freedom.

But five years later, Odette's life is nothing like what she'd planned. She's a widowed mother, living in Los Angeles, and she and Delphine, who is passing as white, have spiraled away from each other. When Delphine reaches a breaking point, Odette must make a shattering choice to try to hold her family together.

Profound and expansive, a story of love and longing, art and motherhood, friendship and desire, Meet Me in the Garden is a decades-spanning tour de force, inspired by the author’s family and tracing the history of the Great Migration.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Queer, LGBT, Historical, Adult, Lesbian, Fiction

400 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication August 4, 2026

About the author

Nina LaCour is the Michael L. Printz Award-winning and nationally bestselling author of six young adult novels, including Watch Over Me and We Are Okay; the children's book Mama and Mommy and Me in the Middle; and Yerba Buena, a novel for adults. She's on faculty at Hamline University's MFA in writing for Children and Young Adults program, and teaches an online class of her own called The Slow Novel Lab. A former indie bookseller and high school English teacher, she lives with her family in San Francisco.

Reviews

[emma]

i love reading sapphic books that make me sad

[Guada]

I'm seated. The bookstore employees are scared and asking me to leave because it's "not August 2026 yet" but I'm simply too seated

[Kim Alkemade · Rating 5 out of 5]

The way I felt reading this sublime novel is how I remember feeling when I read Tolstoy in college. I was completely immersed in the character, her family, and their community as the story crossed coasts and decades. Page after page, the narrative flowed through my mind in a ribbon of stunning discovery as relationships between friends, siblings, parents, and children are rendered with the same attention and intensity usually reserved for romantic love. I continuously delighted in the style of LaCour's prose, savoring every word, every sentence, every scene and setting and all the dialog, too. I was especially moved by the exploration of how it feels and what it takes to create of art, whether it be music or painting or the breeding of birds. In the end, though, what I'll carry with me from this novel is the generosity and hope embodied in its large cast of fully human characters. I was sorry to come to the (perfect) last word; I didn't want to leave this richly-peopled world.

[Dawn Chen]

I mean I haven’t read it but Nina LaCour is my first sapphic English book author and every single one of her work reflects a part of me in a way that’s just…personal. If I’m going to die I’d still want to die after this book is released and I had the chance to read it lol

[Elsary]

August 2026 I'm ready, please come soooooon

[Sydney]

I'm seated and ready to be destroyed

[braidee]

soooooo excited for this omg

[Mark]

New Nina LaCour?! i'm sat.

[Miriam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Accessed pre-publication from NetGalley

[Claudette · Rating 5 out of 5]

No notes.