Mary George of Allnorthover - Hardcover

'You might think a coming-of-age novel set in the English provinces in the Seventies would make drab reading. It was, after all, the decade of the oil crisis, power cuts and water shortages. But what sets Mary George of Allnorthover apart is Lavinia Greenlaw's poetic sensibility; she sees the epoch through fresh eyes. In this, her first novel, her vibrant prose turns monochrome middle England into a surreal, shimmering vision. On the day Tom Hepple returns to the village of Allnorthover, he sees Mary George walk on water. Mary, the book's teenage heroine, represents for Tom a symbol of hope. Her struggle to break out of the chrysalis of youth is mirrored by changes in her own surroundings: the advent of punk rock, the summer of the drought. In Greenlaw's novel we have stock characters (the village retard, the misfit schoolgirl, the dysfunctional parents) but they're all touched by pathos. This is a novel about pain – the pain of illness, of remembrance, of forgetting – and a highly convincing portrait of a tortured, troubled adolescent.' Tatler

‘From the opening pages of Lavinia Greenlaw's MARY GEORGE OF ALLNORTHOVER, I found myself equally spellbound by her endearing, myopic heroine and her witty, wicked prose. This is a vivid and absorbing novel, with a wonderful sense of surprise.’ Margot Livesey

"Mary George is a piece of work – at once one of a kind and one of our own. Ms. Greenlaw adds to a poet's instincts for image and voice her manifest
narrative gifts to turn '70s England into a strange and perilous and wondrous place. Richly textured, rightly told – a standout, a superb debut." Thomas Lynch

“With perceptiveness and verve, Lavinia Greenlaw charts the travails of a spunky new heroine, Mary George, caught in the treacheries and stagnancy of an English backwater in the 1970s.” Edna O’Brien

a mesmerizing debut from a major new English novelist

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.