This book has a double storyline, one revolving around the extra-marital romance between a married woman and her gardener, the other about the woman who finds her diary in the gardener's cottage of her newly purchased country home.

The problem I had with the book was not in the writing, for the writing was well done, but with the fact that the whole book is based on one woman's irresponsible decisions. The message that one can "have their cake and eat it too" is the main theme of the book.

The message it sends to the reader is that affairs based on romance are condonable, but an affair based on sex is wrong. Both are equally wrong and irresponsible, but that aspect is never explored.

The thing I hated most about this book was that I couldn't stop reading it even though I hated the storyline! About halfway through the book, the storyline about the woman 20 years in the past was literally making me ill. However, the book was written well enough that I wanted to discover some of the motivations behind the characters and to see what happened. There were at least two chapters that I had to really struggle through to get the pay-off, though. Unfortunately, I don't think the pay-off was that great. As a happily married woman (not that it's always been rosy), I could not relate to the storyline in the past at all. I could not conjure up any sympathy for the characters. The present-time storyline was a little easier in that regard.