"Funny, surprising and unpredictable. This extraordinary novel . . . recalls Barbara Comyns or Muriel Spark . . . It is old-fashioned in the best way: intrepid, eccentric, and not giving a damn." --John Self, The Guardian
Shortlisted for the 1973 Booker Prize, A Green Equinox is a beguiling tale of a brilliant young woman who falls in love first with her lover's wife, and then with his mother.
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 apupt 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.
Published two years after Elizabeth Mavor's most famous work, The Ladies of Llangollen--a biography of two eighteenth-century Irish gentlewomen who scandalized their families by eloping to Wales, where they lived together on their own terms--A Green Equinox is itself an intrepid exploration of gender, female sexuality, and passion: romantic, carnal, and cerepal.
