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A Green Equinox
'Funny and brave and moving and absolutely bonkers. I love this novel' CHARLOTTE MENDELSON
'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.
'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.
208 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 31, 1973
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 105 reviews
September 5, 2023
Elizabeth Mavor’s unsettling novel centres on Hero Kinoull who runs an antiquarian bookshop in the small, English town of Beaudesert (beautiful wilderness), she lives alone with her cat, and leads a fairly uneventful life. She’s having an affair with married, curator Hugh, brought together by mutual dislike of anything too new or modern, but even that connection is more rooted in routine than passion. Then Hero meets Hugh’s wife Belle a crusader for causes from famine relief to environmental preservation. In a series of convoluted twists and turns Hero becomes infatuated with Belle, but ends up falling in love with Kate, Hugh’s exceptionally capable mother.
Mavor shifts between Hero’s first-person and stretches of third-person narration dealing with the characters around her. There are flashes of acid wit and startling imagery, as well as an array of striking, surreal scenes but these are surrounded by an excess of ornate, frustratingly mannered passages – the baroque style reminded me of another recently-resurrected writer Rosemary Tonks and her operatic approach. There are also copious references from Shakespeare to Freud to Thomas Love Peacock, and to religion through Belle’s faith and Kate’s Edenic garden.
As a novelist, Mavor has been compared to Irish Murdoch, close friend and Mavor’s former tutor, if nothing else they seem to share an interest in fiction as a vehicle for the philosophical. Mavor is tangling with complex questions here: from gender and embodiment to sexuality and intimacy to moral responsibility. Despite the surface emphasis on volatile, personal relationships, Mavor sometimes seems to be constructing something closer to allegory than realism, linking Hero’s fast-paced, sentimental education to broader notions about life and how to live.
Fear of contamination in a variety of forms is a recurring theme. Mavor’s story’s filled with jarring juxtapositions and weird events suggesting a world turned upside down. This is an England in flux, where taken-for-granted social and cultural norms are suddenly up for grabs: Hero and Hugh’s beloved art is being degraded, turned into designs for shower curtains and table mats and sold to the masses; middle-class mothers like Belle are rejecting literature in favour of reading paperbacks and political campaigns like nuclear disarmament; the town’s landmarks are endangered; and the nearby hospital is staffed by people with strange “Asiatic faces” apparently disrupting an otherwise white environment – Hero’s numerous observations about race made me extremely uncomfortable. Hero’s ordered existence is upended by a series of incidents from a violent car crash to a bizarre, typhoid epidemic, traced to tins of dodgy corn beef, that sweeps through the town – a variation on the 1964, real-life Aberdeen outbreak. This is a challenging piece to sum up, I can’t say I liked it and I found Mavor's underlying arguments confused and confusing. But it could also be strangely compelling mainly because it's just so incredibly odd.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Virago Modern Classics for an ARC
Rating: 2.5
Mavor shifts between Hero’s first-person and stretches of third-person narration dealing with the characters around her. There are flashes of acid wit and startling imagery, as well as an array of striking, surreal scenes but these are surrounded by an excess of ornate, frustratingly mannered passages – the baroque style reminded me of another recently-resurrected writer Rosemary Tonks and her operatic approach. There are also copious references from Shakespeare to Freud to Thomas Love Peacock, and to religion through Belle’s faith and Kate’s Edenic garden.
As a novelist, Mavor has been compared to Irish Murdoch, close friend and Mavor’s former tutor, if nothing else they seem to share an interest in fiction as a vehicle for the philosophical. Mavor is tangling with complex questions here: from gender and embodiment to sexuality and intimacy to moral responsibility. Despite the surface emphasis on volatile, personal relationships, Mavor sometimes seems to be constructing something closer to allegory than realism, linking Hero’s fast-paced, sentimental education to broader notions about life and how to live.
Fear of contamination in a variety of forms is a recurring theme. Mavor’s story’s filled with jarring juxtapositions and weird events suggesting a world turned upside down. This is an England in flux, where taken-for-granted social and cultural norms are suddenly up for grabs: Hero and Hugh’s beloved art is being degraded, turned into designs for shower curtains and table mats and sold to the masses; middle-class mothers like Belle are rejecting literature in favour of reading paperbacks and political campaigns like nuclear disarmament; the town’s landmarks are endangered; and the nearby hospital is staffed by people with strange “Asiatic faces” apparently disrupting an otherwise white environment – Hero’s numerous observations about race made me extremely uncomfortable. Hero’s ordered existence is upended by a series of incidents from a violent car crash to a bizarre, typhoid epidemic, traced to tins of dodgy corn beef, that sweeps through the town – a variation on the 1964, real-life Aberdeen outbreak. This is a challenging piece to sum up, I can’t say I liked it and I found Mavor's underlying arguments confused and confusing. But it could also be strangely compelling mainly because it's just so incredibly odd.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Virago Modern Classics for an ARC
Rating: 2.5
October 30, 2025
There are some books that grow on you gradually, where the pull of plot and character becomes slowly more compelling the more you go on. This is the other kind. From the very first page I knew I would love it, when there is a reference to ‘the phrases, convoluted as broccoli, of Sir Thomas Browne’ and ‘the neat unexcitable periods of Pope’. Elizabeth Mavor is the kind of writer I naturally love: wordy, witty, philosophical, concerned with women's experiences, but also rather sex-obsessed; a kind of hornier Iris Murdoch.
The plot of this one sounds like something produced by the more prurient message boards of a fan-fiction website: a bookseller by the ludicrous name of Hero Kinoull is having an affair with a married man, until she develops feelings first for his wife, and then later for his mother. But the working-out of this plot is not played for titillation, but rather for a kind of psycho-social exploration of female attachments and categories of passion, really unlike anything I've read.
Hero, our narrator, is a fun person to spend time with, well-read and smart and versed in history. Her friends, she says, ‘have advised me to stop squandering my vivacity and intelligence and, instead, discipline myself by bringing up a child, or doing social work’, but that's clearly not her style. Her rival-cum-idol, Belle, is by contrast very no-nonsense and well behaved – all ‘snow and sharp cut fir trees, whereas I by comparison was a messy Neapolitan back street’.
Hero's lover – Belle's husband Hugh – is a kind of amiable, bumbling cad, who holds fairly regressive views (‘“Some women do like it,” he insisted. “Being exploited. You don't, but the really feminine ones do”’) and is an expert on the rococo in art, a style which, as Hero puts it, was
Not exactly how I ever saw the rococo, but I suppose when it comes to art peppermint cocks are in the eye of the beholder. And then there is Hugh's mother, Kate Shafto, who stumps around her garden planting trees and making boats to sail on the lake, and who offers a whole new vision of women as Diana-like creatures of nature:
It's funny to see how early reviewers of this book, which came out in 1973, saw the sexual plot as just a vehicle for Mavor's exploration of (in the words of the TLS) ‘pretension, hypocrisy and the immeasurable folly of refinement’. Nowadays readers are, I think, much more likely to take it at face value, and recognise that this is primarily a book about exactly what it looks like: the vast landscape of female sexuality for which there is no adequate vocabulary.
One character frets about ‘chance locking people up until death in inadequately-functioning, wrongly-coloured, wrongly-sexed bodies. Ariels shut in trees’, while another exclaims understandingly, on the subject of bisexuality, ‘We're all ambivalent in some way or another!’, giving ambivalent its full etymological meaning of having ‘both values’.
Mavor quotes at times from Donne's ‘Sappho to Philaenis’ and Rochester's ‘Song of a Young Lady to her Ancient Lover’, two favourites of mine; I felt she had excellent taste throughout, and completely trusted the narrative, which is extremely unconventional and unpredictable, especially in its second half. It's one of those little gems you discover with amazed delight, obviously deserving a bigger audience than it's had; hopefully the Virago Modern Classics imprimatur will mean its time has now come. It's mad and brilliant, and decidedly rococo.
(Oct 2023)
The plot of this one sounds like something produced by the more prurient message boards of a fan-fiction website: a bookseller by the ludicrous name of Hero Kinoull is having an affair with a married man, until she develops feelings first for his wife, and then later for his mother. But the working-out of this plot is not played for titillation, but rather for a kind of psycho-social exploration of female attachments and categories of passion, really unlike anything I've read.
Hero, our narrator, is a fun person to spend time with, well-read and smart and versed in history. Her friends, she says, ‘have advised me to stop squandering my vivacity and intelligence and, instead, discipline myself by bringing up a child, or doing social work’, but that's clearly not her style. Her rival-cum-idol, Belle, is by contrast very no-nonsense and well behaved – all ‘snow and sharp cut fir trees, whereas I by comparison was a messy Neapolitan back street’.
Hero's lover – Belle's husband Hugh – is a kind of amiable, bumbling cad, who holds fairly regressive views (‘“Some women do like it,” he insisted. “Being exploited. You don't, but the really feminine ones do”’) and is an expert on the rococo in art, a style which, as Hero puts it, was
the style of impertinence and irresponsibility, of effeminate giggles, of prurience and pointless, undeserved leisure. It was the style of whipped-cream bums; nipples like glacé cherries; cocks of peppermint; cunts of crystallised rose petals.
Not exactly how I ever saw the rococo, but I suppose when it comes to art peppermint cocks are in the eye of the beholder. And then there is Hugh's mother, Kate Shafto, who stumps around her garden planting trees and making boats to sail on the lake, and who offers a whole new vision of women as Diana-like creatures of nature:
‘It's men who call you forth from that. From that dreamless chastity, just as the father, when he impregnates the mother, makes from her a new and separate creature […]. Don't you think that the Fall is such a witty masculine version of the truth? Woman was there first, of course, we know that, and then, into her untidy, dreamy, overgrown garden which was at once so earthly and so spiritual, came a man; the alienator, the separator, the subcreator, the lawgiver. The only true part of the myth,’ laughed Kate Shafto, ‘is the snake!’
It's funny to see how early reviewers of this book, which came out in 1973, saw the sexual plot as just a vehicle for Mavor's exploration of (in the words of the TLS) ‘pretension, hypocrisy and the immeasurable folly of refinement’. Nowadays readers are, I think, much more likely to take it at face value, and recognise that this is primarily a book about exactly what it looks like: the vast landscape of female sexuality for which there is no adequate vocabulary.
It seemed that no present-day categories existed for it; they are hopelessly narrow in any case.
One character frets about ‘chance locking people up until death in inadequately-functioning, wrongly-coloured, wrongly-sexed bodies. Ariels shut in trees’, while another exclaims understandingly, on the subject of bisexuality, ‘We're all ambivalent in some way or another!’, giving ambivalent its full etymological meaning of having ‘both values’.
Mavor quotes at times from Donne's ‘Sappho to Philaenis’ and Rochester's ‘Song of a Young Lady to her Ancient Lover’, two favourites of mine; I felt she had excellent taste throughout, and completely trusted the narrative, which is extremely unconventional and unpredictable, especially in its second half. It's one of those little gems you discover with amazed delight, obviously deserving a bigger audience than it's had; hopefully the Virago Modern Classics imprimatur will mean its time has now come. It's mad and brilliant, and decidedly rococo.
(Oct 2023)
December 16, 2023
gorgeous. fascinating. funny. bizarre. however, and I recognize that this is a 21st century take, would have been improved by actual gay sex. let that old woman fuck!
September 5, 2024
i don't know what to think of it. its beautifully written but i sometimes struggled to follow the narrators pov. i sometimes would've loved more homo tension because like let that old woman have some fun 🙏
October 14, 2023
2.5?
The blurb made this sound more like a romp than it actually was.
The blurb made this sound more like a romp than it actually was.
September 21, 2020
This Booker Prize short-listed novel is quite a find. With a second-hand paperback, published by the small Wildwood House advertised online at more than £160, copies are hard to track down. Mine came on an inter-library loan after one county declined to release theirs and another reported its copy lost in transit.
What a shame it's not been re-issued, for this is a fine novel, and I would have thought quite radical for its time in its reassessment of gender and female sexuality. It followed the author's non-fiction biography The Ladies of Llangollen of two upper-class women whose relationship scandalised and fascinated early 19th Century society.
In A Green Equinox, the impressionable, at times passive protagonist, provocatively named Hero, allows herself to become the mistress of a fellow antiquarian, then falls in love by turns with his wife and his mother, before achieving a sort of stability.
She ponders the tragedy - and this is 1973 - of “locking up people ..in wrongly-sexed bodies.” The mother, now elderly, remembers the wedding bed "surveying her body torn open, betrayed" and among these Classically-minded minds alludes to the philosophy of Sappho.
The work reads nevertheless as a product of its time as well as a portent of the future. These are people of a privileged elite, seeking at the book's outset to preserve the past from the rude multitude, in which the matriarch - taught to drive by Sir Malcolm Campbell - remembers shooting - and wearing - tigers in India, and a reference to black minstrels uses the n word.
The conversations and inner reflections may seem recondite today, a world in which classical allusions drop like punctuation, viz. "that barbarous Periclean funeral oration that everyone .. goes on about.” Not in my house, they don't. And they are not always happily applied, as “to see Hugh in a rage was to be put in mind of .. the fall of Carthage!”
Those reservation aparts, there is much to appreciate and enjoy in this tightly-written story, with a strong narrative that plays upon the relationship of the past and the contemporary and a style that excels in descriptions of nature, and of the workings of the mind, either in intellectual debate or its wanderings in trauma.
A forgotten treasure - one that maybe a publisher like Virago might profitably bring to light.
What a shame it's not been re-issued, for this is a fine novel, and I would have thought quite radical for its time in its reassessment of gender and female sexuality. It followed the author's non-fiction biography The Ladies of Llangollen of two upper-class women whose relationship scandalised and fascinated early 19th Century society.
In A Green Equinox, the impressionable, at times passive protagonist, provocatively named Hero, allows herself to become the mistress of a fellow antiquarian, then falls in love by turns with his wife and his mother, before achieving a sort of stability.
She ponders the tragedy - and this is 1973 - of “locking up people ..in wrongly-sexed bodies.” The mother, now elderly, remembers the wedding bed "surveying her body torn open, betrayed" and among these Classically-minded minds alludes to the philosophy of Sappho.
The work reads nevertheless as a product of its time as well as a portent of the future. These are people of a privileged elite, seeking at the book's outset to preserve the past from the rude multitude, in which the matriarch - taught to drive by Sir Malcolm Campbell - remembers shooting - and wearing - tigers in India, and a reference to black minstrels uses the n word.
The conversations and inner reflections may seem recondite today, a world in which classical allusions drop like punctuation, viz. "that barbarous Periclean funeral oration that everyone .. goes on about.” Not in my house, they don't. And they are not always happily applied, as “to see Hugh in a rage was to be put in mind of .. the fall of Carthage!”
Those reservation aparts, there is much to appreciate and enjoy in this tightly-written story, with a strong narrative that plays upon the relationship of the past and the contemporary and a style that excels in descriptions of nature, and of the workings of the mind, either in intellectual debate or its wanderings in trauma.
A forgotten treasure - one that maybe a publisher like Virago might profitably bring to light.
October 23, 2024
Thomas Love Peacock meets Muriel Spark. All in all a very strange novel. It started off as a comedy of manners then became increasingly unhinged. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker in 1973 with Iris Murdoch, Beryl Bainbridge, and J.G.Farrell. And there are elements of Bainbridge and Murdoch in this novel: dark social commentary and philosophical enquiries into the nature of good and evil. But does it all hang together? Not really. And that, in a way, is the point -- Mavor is interested in the rag bag of human life.
November 10, 2024
Read this book in one sitting! The plot definitely had me sucked in. Ending was kinda crazy. I struggled w some parts due to the POV change as well as the authors style of writing.
December 12, 2023
Let's get my experience out of the way and then I can expand on some thoughts! So it was great in some parts but it's way way way too difficult and pretentious. The reward isn't worth the work getting there, basically.
There are four main players in this book and I will go through them each:
Our main character is Hero Kinoull, a very nostalgic person who is stuck in the past. She works in an antique bookshop and binds books and stuff I think (as I said, hard to understand this book). What I liked about this character is that she's really the only one who changes throughout. The way the author portrays longing and obsession through her is really great stuff. The experience of being fine with men and then this woman comes along who blows you away is I think an experience a lot of queer women share, as do I. She is pretty terrible though, as a person. She is very cynical, like most of these characters are and at one point she says about a shipwreck that the saddest thing wasn't the boy who died but the ship that sank because it had more history and was more interesting.
Then comes the man so deeply misogynistic and terrible that even his name is a phallus symbol: Hugh Shafto. Hugh is married to a wonderful woman who he looks down on and the fact that he loves her is according to himself proof that he has really good character and that he is an evolved man. He is a Rococo-expert and he has chosen this interest not because he particularly likes it but because he thinks most people don't get it. He cheats on his wife with Hero and when *spoiler* she finally finds out and leaves him for a while, he is devastated not because he actually likes her (my interpretation) but because he "misses love". The character of Hugh grew on me just because he is so absurdly bad that it was very funny. Hugh's mother (who I will get to) is very independent and "masculine" and he doesn't like this really, and he thinks that women actually like being oppressed, at least the feminine ones. Hugh represents the worst parts of cynisism, academia and elitism to me. He loves the idea of women but he has no respect for any woman in his life. He also loves the idea of love and passion but doesn't care to be a loving person. That's what happens when you like the idea of a community more than you like the members of said community.
Hugh's wife Belle was my favourite and my favourite parts of the book were the chapters where our hero Hero and Belle interacted. Belle is a very "typically feminine" character in that she is beautiful and incredibly kind. She is idealistic and always has different causes that she promotes. She has a motto that "something can always be done" and is very practical, which the other characters make fun of (because they're all so terrible). She's so generous with her time and affection and she is insightful in matters of the heart and ways to live. The other characters (her husband and her mother-in-law primarily) find her very stupid and look down on her. It makes sense. Hugh is a huge mysogynist and only likes women as an idea and a source of love rather than as actual human beings. It seems like Kate dislikes Belle because she represents the ideal she could never fit into, a common experience.
Hugh's mother Kate Shafto is something of an enigma to me. She likes to putter around in her garden and has a lot of opinions on women's liberation and such which are all well and good but she isn't that active. She *spoilers again* becomes some sort of lover to Hero at the end of the book and represents a mother to all the other characters in the book, a role that she is somewhat hesitant to take. She is very caring but she doesn't like being seen as a woman and what that represents. I guess you could say she's kind of a cool, larger than life presence but it was honestly pretty hard for me to understand a lot of what was happening.
Those were kind of my thoughts, and it became pretty long which maybe means I got more out of the book than I thought I did. I think the author is trying to satirize and criticize the cynisism and pretentiousness of the characters but the way the book is written makes it unclear because she in her writing style is so pretentious. The best parts were the parts with Belle and where Hero's feelings are involved. So maybe that's the point? That you can talk as much as you want about the past and theories and art and ideas but what really matters in the end are people, the present, what you feel and what you do in the world. That's what I'd like to think at least. If you're intrigued from this review you can give the book a try. It's pretty short. I probably wouldn't have finished it if it wasn't for my reading group but maybe you'll jive with it better.
There are four main players in this book and I will go through them each:
Our main character is Hero Kinoull, a very nostalgic person who is stuck in the past. She works in an antique bookshop and binds books and stuff I think (as I said, hard to understand this book). What I liked about this character is that she's really the only one who changes throughout. The way the author portrays longing and obsession through her is really great stuff. The experience of being fine with men and then this woman comes along who blows you away is I think an experience a lot of queer women share, as do I. She is pretty terrible though, as a person. She is very cynical, like most of these characters are and at one point she says about a shipwreck that the saddest thing wasn't the boy who died but the ship that sank because it had more history and was more interesting.
Then comes the man so deeply misogynistic and terrible that even his name is a phallus symbol: Hugh Shafto. Hugh is married to a wonderful woman who he looks down on and the fact that he loves her is according to himself proof that he has really good character and that he is an evolved man. He is a Rococo-expert and he has chosen this interest not because he particularly likes it but because he thinks most people don't get it. He cheats on his wife with Hero and when *spoiler* she finally finds out and leaves him for a while, he is devastated not because he actually likes her (my interpretation) but because he "misses love". The character of Hugh grew on me just because he is so absurdly bad that it was very funny. Hugh's mother (who I will get to) is very independent and "masculine" and he doesn't like this really, and he thinks that women actually like being oppressed, at least the feminine ones. Hugh represents the worst parts of cynisism, academia and elitism to me. He loves the idea of women but he has no respect for any woman in his life. He also loves the idea of love and passion but doesn't care to be a loving person. That's what happens when you like the idea of a community more than you like the members of said community.
Hugh's wife Belle was my favourite and my favourite parts of the book were the chapters where our hero Hero and Belle interacted. Belle is a very "typically feminine" character in that she is beautiful and incredibly kind. She is idealistic and always has different causes that she promotes. She has a motto that "something can always be done" and is very practical, which the other characters make fun of (because they're all so terrible). She's so generous with her time and affection and she is insightful in matters of the heart and ways to live. The other characters (her husband and her mother-in-law primarily) find her very stupid and look down on her. It makes sense. Hugh is a huge mysogynist and only likes women as an idea and a source of love rather than as actual human beings. It seems like Kate dislikes Belle because she represents the ideal she could never fit into, a common experience.
Hugh's mother Kate Shafto is something of an enigma to me. She likes to putter around in her garden and has a lot of opinions on women's liberation and such which are all well and good but she isn't that active. She *spoilers again* becomes some sort of lover to Hero at the end of the book and represents a mother to all the other characters in the book, a role that she is somewhat hesitant to take. She is very caring but she doesn't like being seen as a woman and what that represents. I guess you could say she's kind of a cool, larger than life presence but it was honestly pretty hard for me to understand a lot of what was happening.
Those were kind of my thoughts, and it became pretty long which maybe means I got more out of the book than I thought I did. I think the author is trying to satirize and criticize the cynisism and pretentiousness of the characters but the way the book is written makes it unclear because she in her writing style is so pretentious. The best parts were the parts with Belle and where Hero's feelings are involved. So maybe that's the point? That you can talk as much as you want about the past and theories and art and ideas but what really matters in the end are people, the present, what you feel and what you do in the world. That's what I'd like to think at least. If you're intrigued from this review you can give the book a try. It's pretty short. I probably wouldn't have finished it if it wasn't for my reading group but maybe you'll jive with it better.
June 12, 2024
Sometimes you’re just in the mood for moody, queer af British novels with all the fraught gender politics and literary melodrama of the 1970’s. What can I say! So odd and compelling, like a fever dream.
No regrets for picking up this pretty little McNally Edition either, which, apart from the banging cover, is a tactile pleasure to hold. It’s my favorite trim size, more tall than wide, with generous line-height and margins, but not so much that it pads out the page count and makes you feel cheated. Graphic design is my day job, but if I were a publisher, these are the specs I would choose. 😍
No regrets for picking up this pretty little McNally Edition either, which, apart from the banging cover, is a tactile pleasure to hold. It’s my favorite trim size, more tall than wide, with generous line-height and margins, but not so much that it pads out the page count and makes you feel cheated. Graphic design is my day job, but if I were a publisher, these are the specs I would choose. 😍
September 9, 2023
This is quite the queer gem! the writing is excellent - super witty and funny, as well as descriptive. The first half I flew through, but I found the plot to go a little haywire in the second half which made me less interested. It's definitely a product of it's time, but a worthwhile read if you're searching for queer (especially sapphic) classics.
Thank you Virago/Little Brown & Netgalley for the e-arc in exchange for an honest review.
Content warnings: illness/death, alcoholism, car crash, misogyny, adultery
Thank you Virago/Little Brown & Netgalley for the e-arc in exchange for an honest review.
Content warnings: illness/death, alcoholism, car crash, misogyny, adultery
October 17, 2023
An entertaining, engaging short novel about Hero Kinoull, an antiquarian bookseller who is having an affair with Hugh Shafto, a married man. The affair has been kept secret for many months. Then inadvertently Hero becomes friends with Belle, the wife of Hugh Shafto. Hero then goes on to become friends with Kate Shafto, the mother of Hugh!
A novel with an engaging plot and interesting characters.
This book was shortlisted for the 1973 Booker Prize.
A novel with an engaging plot and interesting characters.
This book was shortlisted for the 1973 Booker Prize.
August 21, 2024
this was everything it will take me days to recover
March 11, 2025
Let the old woman fuck!! This was fine nothing to write home about but I had fun reading it.
October 1, 2025
Probably five stars but I haven't figured it all out yet. Incredibly unique book on love and desire in various iterations and a whole lot of other stuff. Have your dictionary close at hand because you will be introduced to a fascinatingly new vocabulary. At least, I was.
January 6, 2024
this is the kind of book where i read a whole chapter and realise i didn’t actually read any of the words and i have to go back and read it all over again and this happens like 3 times
July 10, 2025
i think that this is like, objectively good, but for the most part i just couldn't grasp character motivations, which stopped me from really connecting with the story.
July 25, 2024
I think a good chunk of this went over my head, unfortunately. Partly because I didn’t give it enough thought. I liked the writing but didn’t find the plot to be as ‘bold’ as it was described.
September 7, 2023
i recieved an arc of this
this book felt really delightfully surprising in the first half, and the prose is so compulsively, brimmingly gorgeous that it's lovely to read. it manages to have a real grip on itself text wise, always flirting with being too much, too purple, but its playful enough that that's lovely. the plot gets away from itself a bit and i found myself a bit ??? why do i care ??? but it's a nice, solid novel!
this book felt really delightfully surprising in the first half, and the prose is so compulsively, brimmingly gorgeous that it's lovely to read. it manages to have a real grip on itself text wise, always flirting with being too much, too purple, but its playful enough that that's lovely. the plot gets away from itself a bit and i found myself a bit ??? why do i care ??? but it's a nice, solid novel!
May 27, 2024
I rounded this up to four stars. It was a good meaty book that read like a summer hallucination. It was clever and witty and rich with beautiful prose, but sometimes it just didn’t hold my attention and dragged, and then I’d get a bit lost. It was certainly a wild ride and I didn’t know where it would take me, and I’m unsure I enjoyed some of the places it did take me. But overall I think I liked it a lot. It’s certainly a memorable read.
December 15, 2023
"the beguiling tale of a brilliant young woman who falls in love first with her lover's wife, and then with his mother" SPEECHLESSSS
*4.5/5 loved the poetic language and the story itself made me think about love and sexuality and just everything. haven't thought like this since thirst for salt by madelaine lucas. "i shall read the book again. it haunts my memory" me too robert.
*4.5/5 loved the poetic language and the story itself made me think about love and sexuality and just everything. haven't thought like this since thirst for salt by madelaine lucas. "i shall read the book again. it haunts my memory" me too robert.
February 21, 2025
I started this book with not being able to grasp anything at all to suddenly becoming so absorb that I had to reread some pages again to truly consume it.
There is nothing too special about the plot, I just felt I had to know this book.
There is nothing too special about the plot, I just felt I had to know this book.
October 9, 2024
(4.25)
-so funny, so silly, so rambunctious and surprisingly pensive
-saw the ending coming, bit disappointing
-something Wodehouse about the language
-so funny, so silly, so rambunctious and surprisingly pensive
-saw the ending coming, bit disappointing
-something Wodehouse about the language
February 3, 2025
damn these lesbians are crazyyyyy
April 20, 2025
i’m probably just coming at this from a modern standpoint but all this yearning and she didn’t get laid ONCE? poor girl
February 27, 2025
you would be hard press to find more unlikeable main characters than these. Also, it gets a bit racist at the end.
the garden metaphors were nice but a bit underdeveloped – Jane Austen did it better.
the garden metaphors were nice but a bit underdeveloped – Jane Austen did it better.
October 7, 2025
Read from my zoom reading group. I’m a little baffled by this and will be interested to hear other opinions. It was not what I expected.
October 12, 2024
bizarre! I loved it! read this in the shade of a tree, in a park, mandarin juice dripping down your wrists. such a weirdly wonderful exploration of women and love and female attachment. and with the most gorgeous, over-the-top language too!
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