Mary Keen

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The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession

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Heinemann 352pp £12.99 order from our bookshop

Publishers can’t get enough of plants that change men’s lives – the tulip, the camellia, the nutmeg, the potato. You can go into any bookshop and find a story about some growing thing that has driven men crazy, or made them rich, or turned out to be a panacea to cure a whole nation. Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief belongs to this new, hybrid genre.

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