Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire - Hardcover

Eat, Pray, Love meets The Orchid Thief in this rollicking debut novel about plant magic, spiritual discovery, and romantic fever in the jungles of Mexico.

Shortly after her divorce, advertising executive Lila Nova purchases her first plant. It’s a bird-of-paradise, and the seller is David Exley, a rugged “country-sexual” who seems to promise a paradise of his own making. Lila is immediately obsessed—with plants and with the man who sells them—but when David introduces her to the myth of the nine plants of desire, and when she meets a man named Armand who claims to own the nine plants, her obsession reaches unexpected heights: if she can possess all nine plants, the legend goes, her wildest dreams will be fulfilled.
But Lila is too trusting, and as a result she is soon off on an adventure she never meant to take: in the Yucatán, alone, hefting a backpack full of travel guides and expensive shampoo, and learning more than she ever wanted to know about the rain forest—and about herself.

Plant mythology, shamans and charlatans, mysterious spirit animals, orchid obsessives, scorpions,
poisonous snakes, and handsome Huichols . . . they’re all here in this tale of mystery, adventure, and
heat—in every sense of the word.

MARGOT BERWIN earned her MFA from the New School in 2005. Her stories have appeared on Nerve.com,
in the New York Press, and in the anthology The Future of Misbehavior. She worked in advertising for many years and
lives in New York City with a killer collection of plants.