Imprint
- Virago
Virago Modern Classics, Fiction, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), Classic fiction (pre c 1945), Short stories
A collection of stories that combine the macabre and the mundane, by a writer with a sharp eye for the telling detail.
FROM THE AUTHOR SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE (1996) AND THE WHITBREAD PRIZE (2003)
'The Mackay vision . . . as rich in history and wonder as a plain Victorian terrace house' GUARDIAN
'A national treasure . . . She has achieved that rarest of things for a writer' DAILY TELEGRAPH
'The romantic, bizarre, and sometimes murderous underpinnings of seemingly drab suburban lives are deftly revealed in ten densely written tales' KIRKUS REVIEWS
An elderly woman, once an intrepid journalist, is paralysed with apprehension at the thought of meeting the daughter of her dearest friend. A budding writer is taken on a amanuensis by a famous woman novelist, with disastrous results. A would-be biographer visits a home from retired clowns . . . With her miraculously sharp eye for the telling detail, her nose for the secrets smouldering behind the most staid suburban facades, Shena Mackays's wonderful collection of short stories combine the macabre and mundane to brilliant effect.
Shena Mackay
Shena Mackay was born in Edinburgh in 1944. Her writing career began when she won a prize for a poem written when she was fourteen. Two novellas, Dust Falls on Eugene Schlumberger and Toddler on the Run were published before she was twenty. Redhill Rococo won the 1987 Fawcett Prize, Dunedin won a 1994 Scottish Arts Council Book Award, The Orchard on Fire was shortlisted for the 1996 Booker Prize and, in 2003, Heligoland was shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and Whitbread Novel Award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Southampton.
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