1952. Standing in a cold Suffolk field with her family, six-year-old Mary Ward has a revelation: I am not Mary. I am not a girl. I'm a boy. So begins Mary's heroic struggle to change gender. In this book, her story begins from the rural community of the 1950s to London in the Sixties, and beyond to the glitter of America in the Seventies.

From the author of The Gustav Sonata

At the age of six, Mary Ward, the child of a poor farming family in Suffolk, has a revelation: 'I am not Mary. That is a mistake. I am not a girl. I'm a boy.' So begins a 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.

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'Rose Tremain is one of the very finest British novelists' Salman Rushdie

'Tremain is a writer of exemplary vision and particularity. The fictional world is rendered with extraordinary vividness' Marcel Theroux, Guardian