
In this thriller, Sally and Gilly have a secret, one that Gilly hasn’t even shared with her husband. When she was young, she and her best friend Sally, found something one day in the cemetery: they found a box with a dead baby in it.

I first arrived in Japan in the spring of ’84 to take up a job I had got while completing my doctorate on 18th century English literature at Edinburgh University. I had been hired as a “Guest Professor of English” by a new university located in a fishing village in northern Shikoku. Shikoku is one of Japan’s four main islands, but it is also the smallest, the most rural and, at that time – before the construction of bridges linking it to Honshu and Kyushu – the most remote.

Rose and her daughters, Magnolia and Lily, are gardeners. They normally have one big garden, but Magnolia and Lily want to have their own garden this year in which they will grow pumpkins, tomatoes, snow peas, and other veggies. While watering their garden, they discover a mystery. A leaf is moving and going kerplop all by itself. Underneath the leaf, they find a new friend: a toad.