Lavinia Greenlaw's mesmerising debut novel about growing up in the surreal banality of mid-1970s Essex.  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.

Mary George of Allnorthover

Literature & Fiction

Greenlaw, Lavinia

Contemporary

Flamingo

An Irresponsible Age

An Irresponsible Age’, Lavinia Greenlaw's extraordinary new novel, is set in London in 1990, with Thatcher still in power but the country unwilling to 'abandon an idea just because it proved to be a bad one'. In these hesitant times we follow the life of Juliet Clough and her three siblings, all of them interdependent in a not-quite enviable way, clinging together after the death of a brother and the retreat of their grieving parents. When Juliet, the focus of them all, is drawn into a complex love affair with the enigmatic Jacob, the others, too, find themselves falling in love, and then evading the consequences. None will admit what they are doing, or why.

Literary

Fourth Estate Classic House

Set in London in 1990, with Thatcher still in power, Juliet Clough and her threeinterdependent siblings, cling together after the death of a brother and the retreat of their grieving parents. When Juliet, the focus of them all, is drawn into a complex love affair with the enigmatic Jacob, the others, too, find themselves falling in love, and then evading the consequences.

Harper-perennial

Genre Fiction

From the London Zoo to an Essex village and the Arctic Circle, Greenlaw explores elements of place-the child-hood landscapes we leave behind, those we travel toward, and those that we believe to be missing from our lives. Greenlaw's restless, inquisitive tone builds to make Minsk a hypnotic collection from one of the leading poets of her generation. Camel Hair Every few years it becomes a question of backbone. Anhedonia, not love of winter but a loss of the feel of the world, a way ahead of the cold. Even the cells refuse to talk to one another. As black and white as a two-hour wait on the kerb of a six-lane arterial road, in a secondhand straw-coloured Dior coat, for the last bus and its overload to accelerate past out of its own well-oiled backsplash.

Minsk: Poems

Poetry

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

For the misfits, there will always be music. As the sound track to basement parties, late-night drives, and solitary rituals of self-pity, the right music gives context and momentum to the bewildering process of growing up. In this passionate, poetic memoir, Lavinia Greenlaw searches out diaries, LP covers, and old mix tapes to recall the torment and ecstasy of coming alive through music. The Importance of Music to Girls recalls the adventures that music makes possible: sneaking out, falling in love, cutting our hair off, terrifying our parents, and challenging the world. Greenlaw's memoir reminds us how powerfully music has influenced the growth of our minds, and how inspiring the right song can be.

The Importance of Music to Girls

Humor & Entertainment

Picador

The Importance of Music to Girls is the story of the adventures that music leads us into—how it forms and transforms us. As a soundtrack, it’s there in the background while we go about the thrilling and mortifying business of growing up: raging, falling in love, wanting to change the world. Lavinia Greenlaw turns the volume up loud, and in prose of pure fury and beauty makes us remember how the music came first. For Greenlaw, music—from bubblegum pop to classical piano to the passionate catharsis of punk rock—is at first the key to being a girl and then the means of escape from all that, a way to talk to boys and a way to do without them. School reports and diary entries reveal the girl behind them searching for an identity through the sounds that compelled her generation. Crushing on Donny Osmond and his shiny teeth, disco dancing in four-inch wedge heels and sparkly eye shadow, being mesmerized by Joy Division’s suicidally brilliant Ian Curtis—Greenlaw has written a razor-sharp remembrance of childhood and adolescence, filtered through the art that strikes us at the most visceral level of all.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

An original poetic work that brings alive Chaucer’s great love story, illuminating the psychological drama at its heart.
The captivating love story of ill-fated Troilus and Criseyde, first popularized by Chaucer’s poem in the 1380s, is one of the most enduring stories of the English language. In A Double Sorrow, award-winning poet Lavinia Greenlaw breathes fresh life into the medieval tale through a series of seven-line stanzas, which mimic the form of Chaucer’s original poem.
Set during the siege of Troy, A Double Sorrow is the story of the Trojan hero Troilus and his beloved Criseyde, whose traitorous father defects to the Greeks and persuades them to ask for his daughter in an exchange of prisoners. Troilus suggests that Criseyde flee with him, but she knows she will be universally condemned and instead pretends to submit to the exchange while promising Troilus that she will find a way to return to him within ten days. But once in the company of the Greeks, she soon realizes the impossibility of her promise to Troilus and in despair succumbs to another.
In this series of skillfully crafted poetic vignettes, Greenlaw illuminates each small but irrevocable step as these characters argue each other and themselves into and out of love. The result is a breathtaking and shattering read, contemporary and timeless. ---

A Double Sorrow: A Version of Troilus and Criseyde

W.W.Norton&Company

The Importance of Music to Girls tells the story of the adventures that music leads us into - getting drunk, falling in love, cutting our hair, wanting to change the world - as well as the darker side of the adolescent years: loneliness, bullying, getting arrested. Lavinia Greenlaw remembers the music that inspired and accompanied her, and compelled her generation. From fancying Donny Osmond, to wanting to be Ian Curtis, this is a razor-sharp memoir, filtered through the medium of music.

Community & Culture

Faber&Faber

If Lavinia Greenlaw's "Minsk" was about home, her new collection tests the proximities of elsewhere, 'the circle round our house', the road between two lives. Its title recalls a phrase of Robert Lowell's to describe Elizabeth Bishop - one of the book's presiding spirits, with her insistence on the provisional, on the moment in which perception is formed, on landscape as action rather than description. "The Casual Perfect" continues Lavinia Greenlaw's explorations of light and the borders of vision, which include a journey to the four corners of Britain to observe the solstices and equinoxes, and a cycle about the East Anglian landscape which is nine-tenths sky. Questions of travel hover around many of these poems, or questions which need to be 'travelled fully' rather than answered - and which involve the overheard and the glimpsed, what is gleaned from traces and external signs. The result is a collection that is under-stated, spare but inclusive, which invites our presence as readers.

The Casual Perfect (Faber Poetry)

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Books by Greenlaw, Lavinia

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Greenlaw, Lavinia. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Mary George of Allnorthover

An Irresponsible Age

An Irresponsible Age

Mary George of Allnorthover

Minsk: Poems

The Importance of Music to Girls

The Importance of Music to Girls

A Double Sorrow: A Version of Troilus and Criseyde

The Importance of Music to Girls

The Casual Perfect (Faber Poetry)