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Sign up todayMrs. S
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Learn moreA sublime and sensual debut novel exploring the nature of queer love and attraction, the transformative power of desire, and the dissonance between self and place, by White Review Fiction Prize shortlisted writer K Patrick
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 butch antipodean outsider arrives to take up the antiquated role of “matron.” Within this landscape of immense privilege, where difference is met with hostility, the matron 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—an assured, authoritative paragon of femininity. Over the course of a long, restless summer, their unspoken yearning blooms into an illicit affair of electric intensity. But, as the summer fades, a choice must be made.
Seductive, stylish, and disarmingly wry, K Patrick’s bold and revelatory debut smolders with the heat of summer as it explores the queer experience and the force of forbidden love.
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 Fiction Prize for their short story “Eggs”. In 2020, they were runner-up in the Ivan Juritz Prize and the Laura Kinsella Fellowship. Mrs. S is their debut novel.
Reviews
“Katherine Littrell's sultry voice is as luscious and irresistible as Patrick's prose in this steamy coming-of-age novel about a young woman who falls in love with the much older wife of the headmaster at the elite girls school where she works. Much of the novel takes place deep inside the unnamed protagonist's mind as she analyzes her own desires. Littrell masterfully voices her internal turmoil, alongside the sexy and often fraught scenes between her and Mrs. S. Littrell's characterization of the housemistress, the only other queer person in the narrator's life, is especially poignant. The scenes between the narrator and the housemistress come alive with laughter and camaraderie, in contrast to the pained intensity of the rest of the novel.” —AudioFile Magazine
“Patrick’s deft manipulation of narrative time and use of interior monologue to describe the tensions among thought, intention, and action recall the work of Virginia Woolf... The drama of the forbidden affair keeps the reader voraciously turning the pages, but on a deeper level, the novel also offers an incisive and nuanced reflection on self-evolution as the narrator navigates the complexities of gender identity, social power, and the dynamic tension between private and public selves. An erotic yet high-minded literary achievement.”—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
“Revelatory... Patrick makes palpable the compromises required by secret love, and though the romance is aching and well crafted, what emerges above all is a fascinating character portrait, that of a woman obscure to the world but radiant inside.”—Publishers Weekly
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