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
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 -- 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 *
Elizabeth Mavor relishes spirited, unorthodox women, free with their tongues and ready to snap their fingers at convention * London Review of Books *
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 *