Some books enter you like a hallucinatory drug and, for a time, overtake you. You may even begin to dream about the novel you’re reading – or feel somehow that it’s dreaming you. Jane Delury’s second novel, “Hedge,” proves to be such a work. Like most eerily memorable books, it’s about more than itself: Describing its plot can’t quite convey its strange, lingering power. But one must start there.

Maud is a garden historian – someone who revives the grounds of historically significant sites in strictest possible keeping with their original plantings and designs. (She has worked on Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s English gardens.) She’s a devoted mother to two daughters, Ella and Louise, but has traveled from her home in California across the country to undertake restoration of a Hudson Valley estate so that she can get some distance from her troubled marriage to Peter, an Englishman. Peter has cheated on her, and their once-good chemistry’s long gone cold. What’s more: A sweet, smart, handsome, single archaeologist, Gabriel, is working on a dig on the same estate. “He was indeed charming, the kind of man who warmed the air when he spoke to you.”

Review

“Hedge”

By Jane Delury

Zibby. 288 pages.

$26.99, hardcover; $16.99, paperback

Though we readers can’t yet know the timing or scale of the explosion, the pin’s been pulled on a terrible grenade. At first, a series of bucolic scenes go down as sweetly as Maud’s fantasies, “like the final draft of a garden design. She and Peter would get divorced. . . . She’d rent an apartment in Sausalito. . . . By the time (Gabriel) entered her life with the girls, Ella and Louise would have adjusted. . . . They’d become one of those outdoorsy families with tents and dirt bikes.”

But very quickly, events and actions snarl, and tension ratchets around the novel’s peaceful country setting as the mellow story morphs into mystery. (You may find yourself staying up late with this one; hence the dream influence.) Ella’s teenage angst intensifies. Peter’s sour suspicion and possessive discontent mount, until he decides to come over. “‘I don’t want to lose you, Maud.’ But I’m already gone, she thought.” And a delicious affair with the impossibly good Gabriel feels, in the rock lyric’s words, just a kiss away. They’ve started meeting secretly in a nearby orchard, after the girls fall asleep. She recalls a phrase from the love letters between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West: “I am reduced to a thing that wants. She now knew exactly what that meant.”

Please do not let any other review or well-meaning friend give away this novel’s stunning evolution. A great portion of its magic lies in how it turns a radical corner, gaining speed and burning urgency – then slowly becoming something else: deeper, denser, wiser. Readers will (and should) trust it to take us where we need to go – even if not where we expected.

Delury’s language is clear and clean, lavish in garden detail (landscapes, both internal and exterior, gloriously described) yet also taut and sinewy in service to its story. It’s no spoiler to note that Maud’s odd, later friendship with an eccentric, older female artist – in stark contrast with the male-driven exertions of prior pages – ultimately plants in Maud (no pun) another idea for living, for other ways of being, seeing and being seen. And therein lies the golden, if painfully earned, harvest of “Hedge.”

Joan Frank’s latest books are “Late Work: A Literary Autobiography of Love, Loss, and What I Was Reading” and “Juniper Street: a Novel.”