LoveReading Says
LoveReading Says
I’ve been awaiting reading Mrs S since it was first announced – it’s not often you get a butch leading character, and the sexiness of this story was immediately obvious from its early blurb. Thankfully, much like the affair in the novel, the anticipation only made the delayed gratification even hotter.
Mrs S conjures the way details of the beloved becomes painfully meaningful – the heightened awareness of the way your body and mind work, the yearning overthinking and longing for touch but terror that you aren’t desired – the hopeful dread that she might want you too.
We love a literary novel which does chic things like disavowing speech marks and refusing to name its characters (we never know the main character’s name, and other key figures include ‘the other lesbian’ The Housemistress and the eponymous Mrs S, wife of the headmaster Mr S; the school students are all The Girl). The effect is a sense of overhearing a secret, being let in on gossip that’s taboo, dangerous, and so must be coded. It’s a book that forces you to slow down and savour its precise revelations. It’s deft, precise, glass carefully angled to the sun to start a fire.
The story feels timeless, suspended – set in an antiquated boarding school, separate from other civilisation, where our heroine’s queerness is met with a passive curiosity, or tacit hostility, and yet where the performance of gender – the props of binders, chains, rings of keys, dildos – are identifiable to modern readers. It’s grounded, yet enjoys a cinematic melodrama – stolen touches while the husband is next door, a defaced church, girls performing a tragedy and mysterious rituals in graveyards… You’re always tense, never knowing what drama is round the corner, the feeling that prying eyes are omnipresent.
The boarding school where our butch heroine starts as a matron is haunted by homages to the famous dead author; it feels like a nod to the ways in which Mrs S is in conversation with the sapphic canon – echoes of Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt in the attention given to their hands, gloves, delayed touch; Dorothy Strachey’s Olivia in the hierarchical school setting, and the holy language of obsession. Or maybe I’m stretching this just to try to sound clever – am I just describing lesbians? More than just the sexual possibility of sapphism though, I really appreciated that Mrs S is also a love story of queer friendship, the deep sense of belonging and loyalty that forms between the heroine and the Housemistress. I’ve already recommended it to several people.
Lily Lindon
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About
Mrs S Synopsis
An Observer Best Debut of the Year
Powerfully sensual and sublimely stylish, Mrs S is a tale of queer love that smoulders with the heat of summer. In an elite English boarding school where the girls kiss the marble statue of the famous dead author who used to walk the halls, a young Australian woman arrives to take up the antiquated role of 'matron'. Within this landscape of immense privilege, in which the girls can sense the slightest weakness in those around them, she finds herself unsure of her role, her accent and her body. That is until she meets Mrs S, the headmaster's wife, a woman who is her polar opposite: assured, sophisticated, a paragon of femininity. Over the course of a long, restless heatwave, the matron finds herself irresistibly drawn ever closer into Mrs S's world and their unspoken desire blooms into an illicit affair of electric intensity.
But, as the summer begins to fade, both women know that a choice must be made. K Patrick's portrait of the butch experience is revelatory; exploring the contested terrain of our bodies, our desires and the constraints society places around both. Mrs S marks the arrival of a major new literary talent, unlike any other.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9780008560997 |
| Publication date: |
8th June 2023 |
| Author: |
K Patrick |
| Publisher: |
Fourth Estate Ltd an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers |
| Format: |
Hardback |
| Pagination: |
296 pages |
| Primary Genre |
General Fiction
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| Other Genres: |
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| Recommendations: |
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Press Reviews
K Patrick Press Reviews
'The intense physicality of the novel's emotions and its stylish, stripped-back prose make for an arresting pairing' - Hephzibah Anderson, Observer
'A story so seductively and intelligently observed that its pulse continues long after the final page. To dismantle a certain queer narrative into something else is rare and thrilling. I haven't read anything quite like it. Yes. I loved it' - Sarah Winman, author of Still Life
'Mrs S is sublime - at once a languorous slow-burn and a moving reflection on queerness and what it is to be and be seen. I loved this book' - Julia Armfield, author of Our Wives Under the Sea
'I've completely fallen for the astonishing Mrs. S ... K Patrick's watchful measured prose simmers, edging the reader along, asking Will I get what I want? and What then?' - Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
'K Patrick's breathless, splintered prose vividly communicates their subject, which is erotic longing and a desire that must remain clandestine. What a beautifully crafted and uncannily accomplished debut. What an irresistible new voice' - Rupert Thomson, author of Never Anyone but You
'A voluptuous performance in the art of withholding, taut with anticipation through the final line' - Lillian Fishman, author of Acts of Service
'An extraordinary novel: poignant and tough, tender and unsentimental. K Patrick examines with their almost forensic gaze the tiny words and touches that can bring us, however fleetingly, in from the outside' - Marina Kemp, author of Nightingale
'Such a delicately detailed fresco of longing that, upon finishing reading, I felt the incongruous sensation of watching a bird sleep. I can't explain why; I only know I love this book' - Zain Khalid, author of Brother Alive
Author
About K Patrick
K Patrick is a writer based in Glasgow. Their poetry has appeared in Poetry Review and Five Dials, and was shortlisted for The White Review Poetry Prize in 2021, the same year that K was shortlisted for The White Review Story Prize. In 2020, they were runner-up in the Ivan Juritz Prize and the Laura Kinsella Fellowship. Mrs S is their debut novel.
More About K Patrick
