Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists: review of Man Booker shortlist 2012 Yun Ling, the narrator of the Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng's stunning second novel, The Garden of Evening Mists, is a conflicted woman. The sole survivor of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, she is haunted by her savage treatment there - treatment which caused the death of her beloved sister - and yet captivated by Japan's rich artistic traditions. She is also torn between remembering and forgetting. Having spent her life trying to escape the memory of those wartime horrors, she is now suffering from aphasia, a degenerative neurological condition, and must reassemble her past in order to write her memoirs before the details slip away forever. These conflicts frame the book. Tan structures his narrative around Yun Ling's memoirs, skipping back to a remembered past soon after the war where we learn how Yun Ling met Aritomo, a famed gardener once employed by the Emperor of Japan. Aritomo is the creator of a mysterious Japanese garden set incongruously in the remote mountains of Malaya, who Yun Ling entreats to help design a tribute to her dead sister. When he agrees to take her on as an apprentice instead, this position of subservience raises unwanted ghosts hidden in her past. As in his first novel, The Gift of Rain, Tan employs exotic settings and mystical aspects of Japanese culture to drive his narrative. But this time the effect is darker. Aritomo's mastery of the art of shakkei - "Borrowed Scenery" - initially seems enlightened, but as we come to question his true motives for absconding to this obscure backwater, it appears increasingly deceptive. Though later plot elements surrounding a search for buried wartime treasure do not always complement the atmosphere Tan has carefully constructed, this is a beautiful, dark and wistful exploration of loss and remembrance that, appropriately, will stay with you long after reading.