"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, The Guardian

"A sprawling pleasure (come for the oddly troubled surface of a reclaimed gravel-pit, stay for the tragicomedy of intergenerational queer desire)."

--Eley Williams, Granta, Best Books of 2023

"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 . . . [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 Reviews

"This vibrant and resonant story of love and sickness from Mavor (1927-2013) was shortlisted for the Booker when it was first published in 1973 . . . The plague sections of this unconventional story feel au courant, as does the timeless exploration of the many different ways to approach love. Mavor's passionate story endures."

--Publishers Weekly

"Could be described as a mix between Beatrix Potter, J. G. Ballard, and Sophocles . . . A strange, intriguing novel."

--Lucy Sweeney Byrne, Irish Times

"Elizabeth Mavor relishes spirited, unorthodox women, free with their tongues and ready to snap their fingers at convention."

--Jane Adam Smith, 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

"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." --Stuart Evans, Times Literary Supplement

"Buoyant and witty . . . full of English idiosyncrasy and of English nonsense and intelligence."

--Karl Miller

"Elizabeth Mavor is a précieuse without being ridicule. Her dialogue is stylized and stylish, but the note once pitched is skillfully stuck to. Her plot is formal, unfolded with a measured, steady hand. Symbols recognizably smile or frown at you as you go along, like statuettes bordering a cosseted flower-garden. The whole book is very much of a 'performance, ' at once graceful, mannered and, in no pejorative sense, remote."

--David Williams, The Times

Publisher: McNally Editions

Pub date: 2023-09-19

Length: 224 pages