In The Garden of Bad Dreams characters strive for order despite the entropy that surrounds them: a nostalgic circus man is compelled to collect small people; an industrious monk strives to push a mountain away from his monastery; the widow of an English captain tends her rose garden wearing an old Panama hat and tiny red slippers on her bound feet; and desperate soldiers eat an entire zoo, leaving only a pale jaguar from the jungles of South America.

Transporting its readers from a city under siege to a forested hillside in central Serbia, via an ex-servicemen's estate in Badminton, The Garden of Bad Dreams is an imaginative feast, a surprising, exhilarating meeting place for the absurd and the strangely familiar, by a writer at the height of his powers.