a mesmerizing debut from a major new English novelistTheres something about Mary George "And what happens if your face fits but you dont" 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 Marys eyes how a seemingly static landscape is suddenly illuminated by the most vivid bursts of energy, colour and drama. Punks 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

Lavinia Greenlaw

Contemporary

HM Co

<p>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 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.\nFor 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.</p>

The Importance of Music to Girls

Reference

Dictionaries & Thesauruses

FSG.

"Minsk" is Lavinia Greenlaw's third collection, and the first since the title poem of "A World Where News Travelled Slowly" won the Forward Prize for the year's finest poem of 1997. From London Zoo to an Essex village and the Arctic Circle, Greenlaw explores questions of place - the childhood landscapes we leave behind, those we travel towards, and those like 'Minsk' which 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.

Minsk

Poetry

Faber Faber Ltd

A POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION Minsk, Lavinia Greenlaw's third collection, was shortlisted for the 2003 Whitbread Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection. From London Zoo to an Essex village and the Arctic Circle, Greenlaw explores questions of place - the childhood landscapes we leave behind, those we travel towards, and those like 'Minsk' which 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.

Faber&Faber

The importance of music to girls

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

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.

Casual Perfect

Shortlisted for the 2014 Costa Poetry Award. When Chaucer composed Troilus and Criseyde he gave us, some say, his finest poem, and with it one of the most captivating love stories ever written. A Double Sorrow , Lavinia Greenlaw's new work, takes its title from the opening line of that poem in a fresh telling of this most tortured of love affairs. Set against the Siege of Troy, A Double Sorrow is the story of Trojan hero Troilus and his beloved Criseyde, whose traitorous father has defected to the Greeks and has persuaded them to ask for his daughter in an exchange of prisoners. In an attempt to save her, Troilus suggests that Criseyde flees the besieged city with him, but she knows that she will be universally condemned and looks instead to a temporary measure: pretending to submit to the exchange, while promising Troilus that she will return to him within ten days. But once in the company of the Greeks she soon realises the impossibility of her promise to Troilus, and in despair succumbs to another. Lavinia Greenlaw's pinpoint retelling of this heart-wrenching tale is neither a translation nor strictly a 'version' of Chaucer's work, but instead creates something new: a sequence of glimpses from the medieval poem that refine the psychological drama of the classical story through a process of detonation or amplification of image and phrase into original poems. In a series of skillfully crafted seven-line vignettes, the author creates a zoetrope that serves to illuminate the intensity with which these characters argue each other and themselves into and out of love. The result is a breathtaking and shattering read -contemporary and timeless - that builds into an unforgettable telling of this most heartbreaking of love stories.

A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde

Dramas & Plays

Faber Faber Poetry

NIGHT PHOTOGRAPH

A World Where News Travelled Slowly

The Vast Extent

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Books by Lavinia Greenlaw