Mary George of Allnorthover

Mary George of Allnorthover

by Lavinia Greenlaw (Author)

Synopsis

There's something about Mary George ' "And what happens if your face fits but you don't?" Tom enquired. "When you belong to it, the place holds you so tight, you might not notice how it squeezes."' Tom Hepple had to come back to Allnorthover. And there she was again, that girl who walked on water, out onto the new lake above his childhood home. The memory gushes painfully back for Tom, and its undertow carries the girl, Mary George, off. Mary is a strange and lovely creature, a young woman who seems to be more important to many of those in the village than she is to herself. Her importance comes to leak slowly into her life as the layers of history and memory, of secrets and misapprehensions, peel away. Lavinia Greenlaw puts before us the monochrome, immemorial middle England of the 1970s in all its dowdy glory, and has us see through young Mary's eyes how a seemingly static landscape is suddenly illuminated by the most vivid bursts of energy, colour and drama. Punk's torch flares into life and singes the fringes of England. Mary George bears witness and burns brighter still: she is more memorable than even the extraordinary events around her, and the reader will find it devastatingly hard to leave her company, at the end of this exceptional debut.

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Quantity

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 336
Edition: First Edition
Publisher: Flamingo
Published: 19 Mar 2001

ISBN 10: 0007105959
ISBN 13: 9780007105953

Media Reviews
With perceptiveness and verve, Lavinia Greenlaw charts the travails of a spunky new heroine, Mary George, caught in the treacheries of and stagnancy of an English backwater in the 1970s. Edna O'Brien
Author Bio
LAVINIA GREENLAW is the author of two books of poetry, Night Photograph (1993), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread and Forward awards, and A World Where News Travelled Slowly (1997), which won the Forward Prize. She is currently working at the Poetry Library, having previously been Writer-in-Residence at the Science Museum, at a law practice, and in several schools. Some of her poetry will be appearing on a set of stamps being issued in the summer of 2000 by the Royal Mail. She lives in north London, with her partner and daughter.