Coming Autumn, 2023
Listen to the trailer.
There are fairies at the bottom of our garden.
It’s a good first line. Straightforward, but evocative. Obviously indicative of genre, without giving away too much. Sets clear expectations in the reader for the storey that’s going to follow.You know what you’re getting into, with a first line like that.Except, it isn’t the first line to a storey.
It isn’t from a book, a magazine, or even a website.It’s the first line of a journal. A pocket-sized volume, bound in brown leather, and written in old-fashioned cursive, that had spent the last 50 years locked in a wardrobe in the corner of my grandmother’s house. A journal written in 1922 by a little girl named Nadia, who lived in a small village in south-eastern England.And she said what she was writing wasn’t make believe.
She said it was true.
Even fairy tales can be true stories.
Aidan Moss is a writer, actor, aspiring journalist, and very amateur genealogist and family historian. He’s been involved in other audio content under a different name, but this is his first solo project, and he’s terribly nervous he’s going to
do something wrong.He lives within driving distance of Salburgen with his boyfriend, two cats, and the houseplants they haven't managed to kill. Yet.
There is magic in the stories families tell each other.
In university, I realised I was fascinated by familial oral histories, and the way the narratives passed down between generations weave fact and fiction, honesty and hyperbole together into a single storey that becomes Accepted Truth.I knew that, like everyone, my family had its own narrative, but it wasn’t until I discovered my great, great Aunt Nadia’s journals that I really thought about just how much of that narrative had been embroidered, or muted, or sanitised either intentionally, or by the simple passage of time. Reading the journals has started me on a journey of exploration into my own history, tracking the thread of truth in the tale I had been told.At the Bottom of the Garden is as much documentation of that journey as it is sharing Nadia’s storeys, and I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I have taking it.
