Author: Mavor, Elizabeth
Of specific Gay & Lesbian interest
Published on 7 September 2023 by Little, Brown Book Group (Virago Press Ltd) in the United Kingdom as part of 'the Virago Modern Classics' series.
Paperback | 208 pages
127 x 197 x 16 | 168g
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. ***'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 BOOKSHero 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