The Atmospheric Railway
On sale
15th September 2016
Price: £5.99
Selected:
ebook / ISBN-13: 9780349007137
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
‘Her style has a lyric elegance that has deceived critics into describing her, with that most dismissive term of faint praise, as ‘gentle’ DAILY TELEGRAPH
‘The bizarre and the banal, the half-remembered and the yet-to-come’ INDEPENDENT
Shena Mackay is one of the very best short-story writers in the world. The Atmospheric Railway contains not only thirteen brilliant new stories, but a selection of twenty-three more from her previous collections, making it a delight for her existing admirers and the perfect introduction to her work for newcomers.
‘The Mackay vision . . . as rich in history and wonder as a plain Victorian terrace house’ GUARDIAN
‘Her style has a lyric elegance that has deceived critics into describing her, with that most dismissive term of faint praise, as ‘gentle’ DAILY TELEGRAPH
‘The bizarre and the banal, the half-remembered and the yet-to-come’ INDEPENDENT
Shena Mackay is one of the very best short-story writers in the world. The Atmospheric Railway contains not only thirteen brilliant new stories, but a selection of twenty-three more from her previous collections, making it a delight for her existing admirers and the perfect introduction to her work for newcomers.
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Reviews
The heart lifts at the prospect of a collection of stories by Shena Mackay. You can be certain of various elements: laughter, a touch of the blade, underlying shadows, wit, sharpness of perception
There are many writers who can elicit much feeling from a rollicking plot, but very few can manipulate the dreaminess of memory and fantasy with such exacting precision, or make the minutiae of other people's lives so sympathetic
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
The bizarre and the banal, the half-remembered and the yet-to-come, brilliantly intertwine in the sentences of this most imaginative yet most practical of writers
Her themes are generally contained within a domestic framework. She writes about families, loneliness, railways, suburbia, cats, clothes, old age, poets, shape-shifting, the oppression of kindness and the fatal stab of unkindness. Her style has a lyric elegance that has deceived critics into describing her, with that most dismissive term of faint praise, as 'gentle'. She writes with a beautiful, controlled savagery . . .
