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An intrepid exploration of gender, female sexuality and passion: romantic, carnal, and cerebral. This brilliant novel, long out of print, was shortlisted for the 1973 Booker Prize.
While I waited for sleep I retraced the road which brought me to you. Unbelievably it only took six months, equinox to equinox.
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.
Author: Elizabeth Mavor
Paperback Published 12 December 2023
'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