Sacred Country

"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".[5]

Positive review extracts on the back cover of the 2002 Vintage edition :

• "Hypnotic...Curiously beautiful and strikingly original" - Spectator
• "Brilliant...A strong, complex, unsentimental novel" - Times Literary Supplement
• "Rose Tremain writes comedy that can break your heart...Funny absorbing and quite original. I've read nothing to touch it this year" - Literary Review

Stephen Dobyns writes for the New York Times, "a book that makes us feel good about the state of fiction in an uncertain market"[6]

Novelist Lynn Freed observes "The writing... is sheer delight. It is skilled, intelligent storytelling at its best".[7]

Filmmaker Jan Dunn has acquired the film rights to the novel and is adapting the screenplay.[8] Other sources state that Tremain herself is adapting it in three parts for television.[9]

• Roots on the map Review from The Independent by Natasha Walter