A Green Equinox

While I waited for sleep I retraced the road which brought me to you. Unbelievably it only took six months, equinox to 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

Born in Glasgow, 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. The fourth, 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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