A Green Equinox

Funny and brave and moving and absolutely bonkers. I love this novel – Charlotte MendelsonThis 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 – John Self * Guardian *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 * Kirkus *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 – Lucy Scholes * Literary Hub *

Born in Glasgow and 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. Her fourth novel, 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).

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