Press Reviews

• Daily Telegraph

  A harvest festival of sensuous detail, intimate, rich . . . Compulsively readable

• A. N. Wilson

  Evening Standard

  Wholly delightful . . . Shena Mackay is an assured artist

• Philip Hensher

  Guardian

  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

• Anita Brookner

  Spectator

  Shena Mackay has brought off something quite rare . . . the author has set out a rite of passage which will leave few readers unaffected

• Val Hennessy

  Daily Mail

  Totally authentic, agonisingly nostalgic, this poignant everyday story of Fifties folk has the power to lay bare everyone's susceptibility to the ghosts that forever teem around the scenes of our childhood

• Julie Myerson

  Independent on Sunday

  Shena Mackay is a writer in prime: at the height of her powers . . . Her prose is flawlessly seductive and comic, confidently witty and sensual

• Fay Weldon

  Mail on Sunday

  An eloquent, beautifully written, unpretentious novel about a Fifties childhood . . . Mackay moved this reader to tears, not from grief but from joy. Now there's a skill

• Times Literary Supplement

  A celebration of childhood as well as a mourning for the loss of innocence . . . a bitter-sweet, gentle novel, not given to grandstanding or preaching, but shot through with humour and compassion. Her writing brilliantly captures the spirit of the place, where every present sensation has ghostly overtones that make the experience all the more sad and lovely

• Elizabeth Buchan

  The Times

  So touched with magic, so achingly sad and funny that my breath was taken away . . . wonderful