The White Garden by Stephanie Barron

I've never been a Virginia Woolf fan, so I probably wouldn't have picked up this book myself - but it was the book club's choice this month. And actually, I quite enjoyed it!

An American landscape specialist visits England to view a famous garden in order to recreate it for a client. In researching the garden's history, she makes a shocking discovery - a diary that could be an unknown Virginia Woolf manuscript.

"The White Garden" then takes a cue from Dan Brown's "DaVinci Code" by turning into a literary quest for answers that spans England: through university libraries, rare book collections, and even a secret society. The expert and the novice find there's a sexual tension between them, but can't be distracted until the answers are found ...

OK, so it's not really deep cloak-and-dagger adventure. But it was more fun and twisty than I'd expected. And they spend enough time "explaining things" for the "dumb American" that you don't have to be a Anglophile or Woolf scholar to understand and enjoy the tale.