Description
Book SynopsisHere is a wonderful collection of short stories by the writer known for ''the Mackay vision, suburban - as kitsch, as unexceptional, and yet as rich in history and wonder as a plain Victorian terrace house, its threshold radiant with tiling and stained-glass birds of paradise encased in leaded lights'' - Guardian.
Shena Mackay, who first came to fame before the age of twenty with two novellas, is the doyenne of the short form. In this volume of previously uncollected stories - including those read on radio - she constantly surprises with a view of the ordinary world that is not at all ordinary.
A grasshopper determinedly takes up residence on a bathroom ceiling; a gecko hiding in a cupboard brings a strange sort of luck; a woman spies from a distance two older women friends after many long years and a memory of how they gallopedin the playground as Starlight Blaze and Pepperpot plays sweetly, suddenly in her mind; pigs are swaddled in blankets, looking like bab
Trade Review
Mackay's new collection of short stories showcases her genius for building comedy from terseness and compression . . . her precise, unsentimental images, integral to her stories' themes, sum up entire lives . . . A triumph! -- Michele Roberts * Independent *
A collection of exquisitely observed stories . . . Mackay will introduce us to the apparently trifling thoughts of a host of solitary characters and show us, with wonderful imaginative power, interior lives that are expansive, wondrous and tender. And even when her subjects are sad, the great power of her noticing, and her frequently piercing prose, transforms them into something vibrant and tender: her worlds are illuminated by glistening colours, busy wildlife, tactile skies, sibilant seas and responsive flowers. Mackay sees life in excruciatingly vigorous detail. Hers are lands in which it can feel as if everything is in bloom * Telegraph *
Shena Mackay's radiant short stories are skewering, funny and utterly original. Dancing on the Outskirts, a selection drawn from more than five decades of writing, was a high point of the year -- Susannah Clapp * Observer *
Shena Mackay is - as this collection of short stories confirms - a national treasure. Funny and sympathetic, she writes of forgotten poets and faded celebs, her magpie eye seizing delightedly on the tinsel and tat of lives that have passed their peak. Comic gems abound . . . the delight that they offer is, like Mackay's writing, continually fresh * The Lady *
