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Friday August 7, 2026 
7 August 2026
Cammeray local Emma Babbington has released her second novel, The Garden, promising a chilling mystery that stretches from Australia to the historic streets of London.
Writing has been a lifelong pursuit for Babbington and one that runs in the family. “I always wanted to be a writer. Growing up, I was a very bookish kid,” she says. “My dad and my grandpa were both in the newspaper and books business, and I guess I kind of had this little romantic idea that I would follow in their footsteps.”
After years in the magazine industry, a career that began in London in the late 1990s—Babbington’s path to fiction was one of persistence. Despite having four manuscripts completed, it wasn’t until she was 50 that her first book deal arrived.
Her debut novel, The Neighbours (2025), was based on the landscape surrounding her home in Cammeray. “That book is set in a fictional kind of re-imagining of Tunks Park,” she explains. “I started that during lockdown and I was walking every morning down to Tunks Park very, very early in the morning. I just would always get a slightly eerie feeling… I always just got a sense that this was a great place to set the mystery.”
Now, Babbington has turned her focus back to the place where she grew up for her latest release, The Gardens.
“I knew that I wanted to set it in London. I was very nostalgic for the parts of London that I grew up in, which is a very beautiful part of North London called Hampstead,” she says. “It has a lot of these kinds of houses which just always seem to have fascinating tales to tell.”
The Gardens centres on Jess McIntyre, a widow living in Australia who is forced to return to the London home of her childhood after human bones are discovered in the shared garden. The discovery forces a confrontation with the disappearance of her sister, Nina, three decades prior.
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For Babbington, grounding such high-stakes drama in a relatable protagonist was essential. “She’s probably not too far away from me,” Babbington reflects. “I would say that generally the kind of protagonist with whom we start one’s mysteries is often quite a relatable character. It’s the person who steps into a situation and then has to follow the breadcrumbs to figure out what’s going on.”
Jess’s teenage son, Ollie is also along for the journey “I wanted him to be a vehicle with which to show what happens when a kid who hasn’t grown up in a place lands there and sees it all through very kind of naive eyes.”
Underpinning the mystery is a deeper examination of the sinister: “For The Gardens, it explores the idea of intentional communities and cults.”
The Gardens is now available online and in many book stores.