From the reviews for Mary George of Allnorthover:
‘Allnorthover draws its inspiration from the bleakness of south-east England: the foul estuary air, the glint of a razor blade during the Bank Holiday brawls on the seafront, the industrial estates that belch out fruit juice, electrical goods and sausages … But most recognisable of all is the panic and angry desperation all this creates in an adolescent girl who “dressed oddly and spoke well”; of whom it was said, “Her head was up in the clouds; she needed pulling back down”… Greenlaw writes like the poet she is. It is dramatic stuff, but the book’s real power lies in Greenlaw’s ability to evoke the despair and hopelessness of ordinary life: the well-presented man who hides booze in the bushes; the old lady who enjoys having a salon wash because it is the only time she is touched; the married man caught giving a teenage girl oral sex on a village bench. And towering over all this, mixed in with the arrival of punk and the petrol strikes, are the betrayals – most notably those of Mary’s father – and their legacy.’
LOUISE CARPENTER, Daily Telegraph
‘Lavinia Greenlaw’s 1970s Essex is as remote and strange as a scene in a David Lynch film … I was happiest when Greenlaw was at her funniest, and she is a very funny writer.’
Scotsman
‘Beautifully observed … In prose layered like paint, she conjures up the period through details – petrol shortages, power cuts, particular sweets and music, the regulation mini-bottles of warm school milk – that will strike endless chords with readers who grew up at that time. Greenlaw’s nostalgia is palpable, but it is never sentimental, nor is her portrait of the eccentric but loveable Mary George. This is a suggestive, elusive novel, which achieves a magical effect by the gradual accumulation of images.’
KATIE OWEN, Vogue
‘A memorable portrait of youth.’
Esquire
‘Perhaps the greatest strength of Greenlaw’s novel is its unsentimental and wholly convincing portrait of village life. This is rare in English fiction, and here it is beautifully done, from the sniggering girls at the bus-stop to the village disco at which an attempted punk concert gets brutally raided by riot police. The boredom of the English countryside, the static nature of its relationships and prejudices are quietly funny and true.’
AMANDA CRAIG, The Times
‘A rites-of-passage novel with a difference. It’s about an England on the verge of irrevocable change. It’s also about Mary, the novel’s sweet, misfit heroine, who, as she tries to work out where she belongs, attracts obsessive attention … Beautifully written and old fashioned – in a good way.’
Big Issue
‘Greenlaw portrays Mary and the other characters with such conviction, accuracy and nuance that we can’t help being drawn into the story … The action is suspenseful, the dialogue acutely rendered, and the book as a whole is exceptionally well thought out, well written and well paced.’
LA Times
‘A lovely book … Mary George of Allnorthover is about church jumble sales and vindictive social workers and industrial England winding down like a cheap watch. And it’s about the magic influence of the punk culture which – although it should be tearing village life apart – paradoxically keeps it together. These beautiful people, with all their intrigue, and past and present crimes, make up what Chaucer once called “a field of folk”, enough human beings to put together a perfect, representative world.’
Washington Post
‘Compassionate and slyly funny about teenage desire … What is most impressive, ultimately, is the strength and solidity of the house Greenlaw builds around the reader: every brick carefully aligned, necessary and true.’
SUZI FEAY, Independent on Sunday
‘Gorgeous writing … There’s an intelligence and textured richness to Lavinia Greenlaw’s writing that feels almost old-fashioned. She writes for readers who savour rich images and singing sentences and perfectly constructed paragraphs.’
Chicago Tribune
‘Mary fits nowhere. Nor do her friends … A fine novel, Mary George of Allnorthover brilliantly remembers the tedium that seemed a necessary condition of youth.’
London Review of Books
‘Lavinia Greenlaw’s intense first novel is both a moving study of coming of age and a dark glimpse into the workings of an obsessed mind. Greenlaw depicts Allnorthover in prose that is darkly iridescent and evokes Edna O’Brien.’
Baltimore Sun
‘Precise, lyrical prose distinguishes Greenlaw’s haunting novel … Mary and a band of sympathetic characters move slowly in different directions, but also toward an inexorable and tragic dénouement.’
Publishers Weekly
‘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
‘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 significant book … What appears as a novel of its time soon grows to become a portrait of the ebb and flow of perception, reality and fate. Time and memory, death and loss flow through the narrative … and those brief moments when we glimpse beyond our fates.’
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
‘An imaginative fusion of past and present … In times past, when news travelled more slowly, the subject of this book would have suited a ballad or a novel by Hardy. Instead, the author transcends the boundaries of the poetic tradition from which she writes but does so to salvage its heritage for the here-and-now. A radical, poetic novel.’
Süddeutsche Zeitung