Promotional Information

KEY POINTS- * Shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize. * Hardback received ecstatic reviews and wide press profile coverage - a perfect platform from which to launch the paperback. * Beautiful new package. * Shena Mackay is a major voice in the British literary fiction. * A Minerva Lead paperback title. * Paperback will be supported by a massive publicity and marketing campaign. * Mackay backlist r

About the Author

Shena Mackay was born in Edinburgh. She is the author of four previous collections of stories - Babies in Rhinestones, Dreams of Dead Women's Handbags, The Laughing Academy and The World's Smallest Unicorn. Her novels include Dunedin, The Orchard on Fire (which was shortlisted for the 1996 Booker Prize), The Artist's Widow and Heligoland (which was shortlisted for the 2003 Orange Prize).

Reviews

"A harvest festival of sensuous detail, intimate, rich... Compulsively readable" Daily Telegraph "Mackay moved this reader to tears, not from grief, but from joy. Now there's a skill" -- Fay Weldon Mail on Sunday "An extremely beautiful and funny novel... The Orchard on Fire is probably Mackay's most perfect book, produced with a technical adroitness and shapeliness which one can only envy" -- Philip Hensher Guardian "Shena Mackay is a writer in prime: at the height of her powers... Her prose is flawlessly seductive and comic, confidently witty and sensual" -- Julie Myerson Independent on Sunday "Wholly delightful... Shena Mackay is an assured artist" -- A. N. Wilson Evening Standard

"A harvest festival of sensuous detail, intimate, rich... Compulsively readable" Daily Telegraph "Mackay moved this reader to tears, not from grief, but from joy. Now there's a skill" -- Fay Weldon Mail on Sunday "An extremely beautiful and funny novel... The Orchard on Fire is probably Mackay's most perfect book, produced with a technical adroitness and shapeliness which one can only envy" -- Philip Hensher Guardian "Shena Mackay is a writer in prime: at the height of her powers... Her prose is flawlessly seductive and comic, confidently witty and sensual" -- Julie Myerson Independent on Sunday "Wholly delightful... Shena Mackay is an assured artist" -- A. N. Wilson Evening Standard

It's always a puzzle when a writer as talented as Londoner Shena Mackay remains virtually unknown on these shores, but her comparative obscurity here, despite rave reviews for A Bowl of Cherries and her short-story collection, Dreams of Dead Women's Handbags, may be dispelled with the publication of this finely wrought and touching novel. Narrator April Harlency looks back at the year 1953, when she was eight years old and had just moved to Stonebridge, in Kent, where her parents became proprietors of The Copper Kettle tearoom. April speedily becomes best friends with flame-haired Ruby Richards, daughter of the publicans who run the local saloon. The girls share a passion for reading, and for their secret sanctuary, an abandoned railway car hidden in an orchard. Despite their closeness, however, April can't bring herself to talk about the sexual molestation she endures from elderly Mr. Greenridge, who seems so kind and generous that April's oblivious parents chide her when she tries to stay out of his way. Nor does Ruby talk about her own father's physical abuse. Mackay brilliantly captures a child's voice and view of the world, the unspoken misapprehensions, fears and terrors‘some imaginary, some well founded‘that haunt April's dreams. Her prose a marvel of precise, evocative detail and almost sensual intensity, she shadows her gently humorous depiction of the ordinary daily life of a child‘school, a Christmas pageant, the birth of April's brother‘with the undertow of anxiety in April's mind. Ironically, while April seems the most seriously threatened by creepy Mr. Greenridge's increasingly bold advances, it is Ruby whose life undergoes a wrenching change. The ending, which involves a tombstone inscription that jolts both April and the reader, would be trite in other hands, but Mackay reworks a familiar fictional device into something poignant and true. The throb of real life among blue-collar families animates this subtle and compassionate story, as does Mackay's insight into a child's view of the world. (Oct.)