SOURCE: Milne, Kirsty. “Mind Games.” New Statesman and Society 7, no. 289 (11 February 1994): 39-40.

In the following review, Milne lauds Kennedy's continued expertise at crafting confident short fiction but criticizes the more experimental stories in Now That You're Back.

The young Scots writer A L Kennedy comes trailing clouds of dangerous eulogy. Her first collection of stories, published by Polygon in 1990, revealed an accomplished writer always one step ahead of her reader's expectations. Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains—a title so intriguing as to prompt on-the-spot purchase—proved worth buying for the cool conviction of Kennedy's prose. Her characters (usually Scots, usually women) made sense of their lives through offbeat obsessions. There was the woman who saw her detested husband and sons as goblins; the researcher who tailed strangers and wrote their obituaries; the wronged wife fixated by the Garscadden trains.

Kennedy followed her success with a novel, Looking...