Sacred country
(Book)

"I have a secret to tell you, dear, and this is it: I am not Mary. That is a mistake. I am not a girl. I'm a boy." In 1952 at the age of six the child of a poor farming family in Suffolk has a revelation. She isn't Mary. She's a boy. An inexplicable mistake has been made and will have to be rectified. So begins Mary's heroic struggle to change gender, while around her others fight to discover a place of meaning in a savage and confusing world. Mary's fight to become Martin, her claustrophobic small town, and her troubled family make up the core of this remarkable and intimate, emotional yet unsentimental novel. As daring as Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Sacred Country inspires us to reconsider the essence of gender, and proposes new insights in the unraveling of that timeless malady known as the human condition. As Mary's mother, Estelle, observes, "There are no whole truths, just as there is no heart of the onion. There are only the dreams of the individual mind." Sweeping us through three decades, from the repressive English countryside of the fifties to the swinging London of the sixties to the rhinestone tackiness of seventies America, Rose Tremain unmasks the "sacred country" within us all.

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, 1992.