Sacred Country

Tremain, Rose. Sacred Country.
The novel is about Mary/Marty/Martin. She is a misunderstood and ill-loved girl. Her mother Estelle is caught in a loveless marriage with Sonny. Timmy, her brother is loved and therefore hated by Mary. At six, she deciedes she is a boy and not a girl. This strong belief persists throughout her life and makes her closested and totally different from others. She falls in love with a girl, lindsey in her class but her love remains unrequitted. The narrative also weaves other stories, like that of Gilbert the dentist, and Walter the butcher, Edward and Irene, Pearl and Billy her step brother, Cord, Mary's/Martin's grandfather and McRye her teacher. Rose Tremain in her author''s statement says that: "I suspect that many writers deceive themselves about why they write. My self-deception is that I create in order to understand and that the final end of it all might be wisdom. This means that I deliberately seek out the strange, the unfamiliar, even the unknowable, as subjects for my novels and trust my imagination to illuminate them to the point where both I and the reader can see them with a new clarity. The writers I admire most seem to have this kind of goal: to comprehend experience distant from their own, in nature, place and time, and to let the extraordinary cast new light on the quotidian."