Product Description

At the age of six, Mary Ward, the child of a poor farming family in Suffolk, has a revelation: she isn't Mary, she's a boy. So begins Mary's heroic struggle to change gender, while around her others also strive to find a place of safety and fulfilment in a savage and confusing world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8731 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

The Times
‘A remarkable novel…The product of a truly original mind, whose inventions are magically unforseeable’

Daily Telegraph
‘A major book’

Spectator
‘Hypnotic…Curiously beautiful and strikingly original’

Customer Reviews

A celebration of human weakness and triumph
Six year-old Mary stood quietly in the snow, with her family, as they mourned the death of King George VI, and thought "I am not Mary. That is a mistake. I am not a girl. I am a boy."

This is an enchanting story of people in a small village in the south of England trying to make sense of their lives.

It is not a book of tragedy. There is sadness, but there is joy. There is death but there is life. There is hopelessness but there is also the urge to become.

In its depiction of the complex network of relationships, there is probably more real truth about the way people are, than in a thousand psychology texts.

Walter with his dream of becoming a singer and songwriter believing that his dreams can never be fulfilled. Jimmy also nearly becoming trapped in a life not of his choosing. Both breaking out in their own special ways. Edward Harker, with his hat held discreetly in front of his trousers, believing that his feelings, at 61, for Irene are improper. And Irene never realising that a man could find her attractive as a woman.

Sonny, withdrawn inside himself occupied only with the farm that provided the family living. Estelle retreating into fantasy to escape a life of emptiness.

But, most of all, Mary who is really Martin, displaced in the family's cognisance by the arrival of the younger brother, despising him for his scrawny weakness, going through school to adulthood, meanwhile finding her true love and losing it, but growing triumphantly in her, then his, own individual way.

A great novel.
I loved this novel. I haven't read it recently so some of the details are fuzzy but I do remember being amazed by the story and the author's writing style.

"Sacred Country" is about a young girl, Mary Ward, who, at the age of six, realizes that she should be boy. The book is a chronicle of her life from that point on. I found the detailed descriptions of the odd things that captured Mary's curiosity as a child (and as an adult, in a different way) intriguing. I won't lie, this is a very sad story at times, and is hard to read in some parts because of Mary's loneliness. The loneliness is never stated and packs a harder punch because of it. All in all, this book explained to me in stunning writing, the process of finding all of the right worlds in oneself. And, dealing with them when they don't fit or express into a manageable form to the outside world. It is a coming of age story to the self and to life. I like to read to learn - about happiness, sadness, life - this book delivered in a big way for me.

The most fantastic book ever published.
In the summer of 1996, when I was feeling particularly confused and lonely I picked up a copy of sacred country and read it. Wow is the only word I can think of to summarise how I felt about the book. It gave me insight in to the struggles of others; the dilemas faced by Mary, Timmy, Estelle, Cord, Sonny Walter and the many other characters in the book opened my eyes to the world around me and made me alert to the emotions and insecurities of others. I have read the book 32 times since then and each time I find something else to break my heart or I notice something new in the story I never did before. The last time I read it I cried when Mary/Martin sat at the fountain in London wondering which parts of Mary she would miss when she finally became Martin. The way Rose Tremain creates a world into wich you can steo and find something new time and time again is fascinating. Whether it is Pearl's beauty, mary's struggle or Estelles madness that grips you the first time you read Sacred Country, you will find that it is something else entirely trhat grips you the second time. Fantasic, Tremain's most powerful work yet.