A powerful, involving new novel, following on from the author’s much-praised debut novel ‘Mary George of Allnorthover’. ‘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.

Lavinia Greenlaw’s mesmerising debut novel about growing up in the surreal banality of mid-’70s Essex. Lavinia Greenlaw puts before us the monochrome, immemorial middle England of the 1970s in all its dowdy glory, and has us see through the mercurial, bewitching Mary George’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 about growing up under the shadow of an unknowable, inescapable small-town mystery.

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.

This is a story about a woman and a man who meet by chance. Nothing of any importance is said, yet she suddenly turns away, leaves the room, and starts to run. She is in shock from what this man has brought back to life: an electrical affinity, a higher self, a feeling of having been woken, recognized, and desired.Iris, a museum conservator in her late forties, is in the midst of separating from her husband, with whom she has two daughters. Her house is falling down, money is tight, and her husband is unwell. The man she meets is Raif, a stalled academic whose wife has died and whose girlfriend is about to move in. He is not as mysterious as he appears.Iris and Raif have no say. For all we talk about love; name its parts; explain it to each other, it is something that just happens to us. We repeat steps laden with memory. In the City of Love's Sleep reveals love in all its inscrutable complexity: the raw nature of feeling and its uncontrollable,...

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,...