The new novel by Scarlett Thomas, an English writer who has won fame as one of the best and most original novelists of our time, is a paradoxical family saga, witty, exciting, with many facets of meaning. This is a novel about the secrets of botany and about the mysterious connection between plants and people, about sex, about the labyrinths of human consciousness, about magic books, about gaining eternal freedom at the cost of death. Fatal seed pods inherited by the heroes promise enlightenment. But which of them would venture beyond life and death?