Despite the romance-design of its cover, Ahern’s latest novel is actually a story concerned with friendship, or, more broadly, relationships.

The ‘You’ in the title refers to Matt Marshall, a right-wing radio DJ, while the ‘I’ is his neighbour, Jasmine Butler, the book’s narrator. The two become friends over the course of a year which sees Jasmine on “gardening leave”, a year of payrolled idleness following dismissal from her job in a start-up company.

Gardening, indeed, is the central conceit of the book: riven by her old boss’s heated suggestion to “‘finish something you’ve started for once’” and by her intense boredom, Jasmine resolves to restore beauty to the garden. The privacy, self-sufficiency and replenished sensitivity this provides neatly parallels her changing relationship with Matt, her family, and a new love interest.

Ahern invokes this Edenic association of gardening with knowledge right from the start, when, in her grandfather’s garden after his funeral, Jasmine gains a ‘knowledge of death’, which is for her the point where life really “began”.

It also has roots in Jasmine’s Irishness (the book is set in North Dublin), with the narrator recalling Healey; “Maybe it’s the genes I inherited from my Granddad, or maybe it’s the fact that I’m Irish, have sprung from the land and this compulsion to dig, and the digging itself, breathes life back into me.”

The book unfortunately does not handle this fundamental metaphor with the subtlety or delicacy it deserves. Ahern often bluntly exposits the parallels between Jasmine and her garden — “My garden is the mirror of me” – and the narrative in general is dulled and dragged by her readiness to explain it.

The novel strives to be well-written, readable fiction, but, with a story largely uneventful and unsuspensful, it begs for wittier, more compelling and more original characters than it delivers. The prose, furthermore, is often too weak to support.

The first section, entitled ‘Winter’ – the book is four sections corresponding to the seasons – is the weakest and, frustratingly, the longest, which in one way is appropriate, but is mostly just boring and likely to deter readers. Once one reaches the ‘Spring’ section, 145 pages in out of a total 323, the novel does pick up in pace and interest. And, just as Jasmine’s garden starts to show life, so does the narrative. It still lags noticeably, however, and I suspect that only fans of Ahern’s earlier work will be inclined to stick with it to the end.