A Green Equinox

Elizabeth Mavor

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Paperback

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English

Virago
14 November 2023

Fiction & Literature; Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

Series: Virago Modern Classics

While I waited for sleep I retraced the road which brought me to you. Unbelievably it only took six months, equinox to equinox.

This dazzling rediscovered classic, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1973, is a heady, witty and seductive exploration of female sexuality - perfect for fans of Iris Murdoch and Brigid Brophy.
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'Funny and brave and moving and absolutely bonkers. I love this novel' CHARLOTTE MENDELSON

'A transgressive classic . . . intrepid, eccentric, and not giving a damn' OBSERVER

'Elizabeth Mavor relishes spirited, unorthodox women, free with their tongues and ready to snap their fingers at convention'

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

Hero Kinoull is an antiquarian bookseller whose sedate life in

the picturesque English town of Beaudesert is turned upside down between the

spring and autumn equinoxes of a single year. First her quiet but forbidden

liaison with Hugh Shafto, the curator of the country's finest collection of

Rococo art, comes to an abrupt halt when she develops an adoration for his

straight-talking, do-gooding wife Belle.

But this relationship leads to other, even more unexpected feelings for Belle's widowed mother-in-law, the

majestic Kate Shafto, who spends her days tending her garden and sailing her

handmade boats in the waters of the miniature archipelago she's constructed in a disused gravel pit.

'A strange little nugget of a novel . . . I'd like any book that could be described as a mix between Beatrix Potter, JG Ballard and Sophocles' Irish Times

'A sprawling pleasure (come for the oddly troubled surface of a reclaimed gravel-pit, stay for the tragicomedy of intergenerational queer desire)' Eley Williams

By: Elizabeth Mavor
Imprint: Virago
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 196mm, Width: 126mm, Spine: 24mm
Weight: 169g
ISBN: 9780349018393
ISBN 10: 0349018391
Series: Virago Modern Classics
Pages: 208
Publication Date: 14 November 2023
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Born in Glasgow, educated at Oxford, where she was the first woman to edit the university magazine, Cherwell, Elizabeth Mavor (1927-2013) was the author of five novels. The fourth, A Green Equinox (1973) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Drawn to the lives of women, both real and imaginary, who flouted convention, her non-fiction works include two historical biographies: The Virgin Mistress: A Study in Survival (1964); and The Ladies of Langollen (1971).

Reviews for A Green Equinox

Funny and brave and moving and absolutely bonkers. I love this novel -- Charlotte Mendelson A Green Equinox is a book of astounding precocity in content, imagery, character and style . . . a masterly study of pretension, hypocrisy, and the immeasurable folly of refinement * Times Literary Supplement * Elizabeth Mavor relishes spirited, unorthodox women, free with their tongues and ready to snap their fingers at convention * London Review of Books * Funny and brave and moving and absolutely bonkers. I love this novel