"This hauntingly beautiful chiller creeps up on the reader like the vines spreading over Adeil and Josette’s house." —Publishers Weekly A mysterious young girl seeks out a florist to deliver a painful truth that will forever change them both in this tender, gothic drama about our need for love and the creatures we become in its absence. On a quiet street in early twentieth-century New Orleans, a florist works through the night to craft a floral arrangement for a peculiar customer—a precocious young girl named Adeil who pays the florist in stories. For every new flower the florist adds to the bouquet, Adeil offers another dissonant detail in her narrative: a chance meeting with a disillusioned jazz singer, a dilapidated family home, an idyllic life on the fringes of an imperfect world.

As dawn approaches and the arrangement takes shape, the florist is left to piece together the final details of Adeil’s mysterious life and ponder what this means for her own story. From Eisner Award-winning writer Darcy Van Poelgeest (Little Bird, Precious Metal) and rising-star watercolor artist Erin Connally comes The Cutting Garden, a gorgeously rendered meditation on companionship, family, and sacrifice.