This morning they found him with his nose in it a man called Bardagaud

This morning they found him with his nose in it” ); a man called Bardagaud who used to cycle down the hill making a ” ding-a-ling” noise with his mouth gets run over by a car; and, in the end, the gardener himself grows sick. ” Underpinning the whole project is, however, a need to broach the curse of mortality. Du Pont the Baker drops dead without warning (according to the gardener he looked fine the day before: “a bit pale, maybe, but then he had flour on his face. He’s brought it so he can teach Cueco how to hammer out a scythe “No one knows how to do it any more,” says the gardener “With machines now no one needs a scythe.

Cueco picks him up at the railway station and finds his luggage is very heavy: “Have you got gold bars in your suitcase?” asks Cueco “An anvil,” replies the gardener. Up to a point the conversations seem random: a series of mundane encounters offset by the odd weird detail or stab at profundity that prevents matters from dropping off into banality The gardener visits the artist in Paris, for example. The fact that Cueco has indicated the small amount of action in a similar style to a screenplay helps spur the reader on In places, it reads a little like Ionesco. Did Cueco wander around with a tape recorder stuck under his gardener’s nose? Whatever the modus operandi, the result is charming and, in its more cryptic moments, genuinely compelling. Conversations With my Gardener by Henri Cueco trs George Miller (Granta £6.99) Translated from the original French, this curious memoir from the artist and writer Henri Cueco, almost exclusively made up of dialogue, is a very odd proposition indeed.

The first few pages may be a shock to the system, but the rest will more than justify it. Readers normally averse to books rooted in the distant past should give this one a chance. Much historical fiction thrives on caricature, but the characters in Ghost Portrait live and breathe, full of memories and regret. Art is discussed in a low-key but highly informed fashion, and the Digger community (Diggers proposed cultivating common land to support their communities) at Cobham Heath, Surrey, is described in detail, but always in the context of the human drama. Before long the old man is groping around in a secret priest hole to show William the last paintings he worked on before his sight deteriorated.

He makes William a proposition: if the young man can complete a portrait of Deller’s dead wife, he can court his daughter. It’s a neat premise that allows Norminton to write a simple story while engaging with a range of cultural and social concerns. William Stroud calls to visit the elderly, almost blind painter Nathaniel Deller, his former teacher. It’s a testament to Norminton’s storytelling skills that a 17th-century idiom regularly launching descriptions like “the pastry coffin of the evening’s meat” (presumably some kind of pie) at the reader soon feels as comfortable as a Leveller’s boot. But a new understanding of why your estate agent rips you off is probably worth the price of the book. Ghost Portrait by Gregory Norminton (Sceptre £7.99) As with much historical fiction, starting to read this book is a little like being asked to join a dance you barely know the steps to; one that seems a little ridiculous until you’re into the swing of it.