Description
When Percy and Betty Harlency abandon their seedy Streatham pub for the Copper Kettle Tearoom in Kent, life for their daughter, April, changes dramatically. She is befriended by the wonderfully dangerous Ruby, whose red hair and brutal home life emphasize her love of fire, and by the creepy but immaculately dressed Mr Greenridge, who lies to follow her around the village. Mingling the innocent with the sinister and laced with the tragic and the bizarre, this is a rare evocation of a 1950s childhood.
‘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
‘A harvest festival of sensuous detail, intimate and rich … compulsively readable’ Maggie Gee, Daily Telegraph
‘Shena Mackay is a writer in prime: at the height of her powers … Her prose is flawlessly seductive and comic, confidently witty and sensual’ July Myerson, Independent on Sunday
‘Wholly delightful … Shena Mackay is an assured artist’ A.N. Wilson, Evening Standard
‘[An] eloquent, beautifully written, unpretentious novel about a Fifties childhood … Mackay moved this reader t tears, not from grief, but from joy. Now there’s a skill’ Fay Weldon, Mail on Sunday
Paperback, 215 pages. In very good preloved condition.