Sacred Country

Sacred Country

Authors

Rose Tremain

Publisher

Macmillan Publishing

Publication Year

1992

ISBN

9780671886097

Pages

336 pages

Genre

historical

Format

novel

Item Type

Fiction

Annotation

"I have a secret to tell you, dear, and this is it: I am not Mary. That is a mistake. I am not a girl. I'm a boy." Mary's fight to become Martin, her claustrophobic small town, and her troubled family make up the core of this remarkable and intimate, emotional yet unsentimental novel. As daring as Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Sacred Country inspires us to reconsider the essence of gender, and proposes new insights in the unraveling of that timeless malady known as the human condition. As Mary's mother, Estelle, observes, "There are no whole truths, just as there is no heart of the onion. There are only the dreams of the individual mind." Sweeping us through three decades, from the repressive English countryside of the fifties to the swinging London of the sixties to the rhinestone tackiness of seventies America, Rose Tremain unmasks the "sacred country" within us all.

Grade Level

9-12

Diversity Topics

LGBTQ (Gender and Sexuality); Transgender; transgender; girl to boy

Main Character

transgender boy

Race/Ethnicities

White

Family Formation

mother and father

LGBTQ+

girl to boy

Keywords

physical identity; Olympics; mental hospital; alcoholism; transformation

Diversity Impact

direct

Sacred Country

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