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. This dazzling rediscovered classic, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1973, is a heady, witty and seductive exploration of female sexuality - perfect for fans of Iris Murdoch and Brigid Brophy. *** '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 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. 'A strange little nugget of a novel . . . I'd like any book that could be described as a mix between Beatrix Potter, JG Ballard and Sophocles' Irish Times 'A sprawling pleasure (come for the oddly troubled surface of a reclaimed gravel-pit, stay for the tragicomedy of intergenerational queer desire)' Eley Williams

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).