A. L. Kennedy is one of the most consistently energetic and critically acclaimed novelists to have emerged from Scotland in the closing years of the twentieth century. Since the early 1990s she has produced novels, collections of short stories, nonfiction books, stage plays, television scripts, a motion-picture screenplay, and several journalistic pieces. Her critical reputation has steadily broadened as her readership has become international. Initially hailed as a major new voice by the Edinburgh press, she has subsequently been lauded in the columns of newspapers and magazines published in London and New York and elsewhere in North America. Reviewing the U.S. edition (1999) of her short-story collection Original Bliss (1997) in The New York Times on 14 February 1999, the poet Thomas Lynch declared that "Kennedy is a world-class fiction writer." It might also be said of Kennedy herself, as Lynch said of one of her fictional characters, that she is...