A Green Equinox
On sale
7th September 2023
Price: £9.99
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 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
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Reviews
A Green Equinox's subject is love and its multifarious manifestations: carnal, romantic, or cerebral . . . [Mavor] is an unapologetic maximalist, who indulges in hyperbole, metaphor and poetry. But her flights of linguistic fancy are always tempered by a return to reality. One minute she's invoking Roman mythology, the next she's comparing somebody to a bathroom fixture-'Belle's nature was smooth and antiseptic, a flat white statement, as alien and inarguable with as a toilet pedestal'-and there's a beauty in each
Elizabeth Mavor relishes spirited, unorthodox women, free with their tongues and ready to snap their fingers at convention
Elizabeth Mavor relishes spirited, unorthodox women, free with their tongues and ready to snap their fingers at convention
This newly republished 1973 novel about a bookshop owner's love life is funny, surprising and unpredictable. This extraordinary novel . . . operates as a cry for passion and against lassitude . . . A Green Equinox is a book whose transgressive nature slips by the reader easily through the comedy, colour and final tragedy of its telling. There is a particular sensibility here-unpredictability, comedy in darkness, turning things upside down in fewer than 200 pages-that recalls Barbara Comyns or Muriel Spark. But most of all this is that rare bird, a novel entirely sui generis, with no clear antecedents and no imitators. It is old-fashioned in the best way: intrepid, eccentric, and not giving a damn
Funny and brave and moving and absolutely bonkers. I love this novel
Funny and brave and moving and absolutely bonkers. I love this novel
In a reissue of the late Mavor's 1973 Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, heroine Hero Kinoull is already in the throes of an affair-the first of three she will have over the course of a year . . . Mavor writes beautifully about time and explores how each affair gives Hero the opportunity to orient her relationship to it: With Hugh, she revels in the past; with Belle, she looks hopefully toward the future; and with Kate Shafto, she finally lives unapologetically in the present. [In] lush and ornate prose . . . she effectively captures the timelessness of love, grief, sexuality, illness, and desire. A transgressive novel about love, art, and gender is given new life
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
