SOURCE: Sage, Lorna. “A Light Touch with the Horrors.” Times Literary Supplement (10 July 1992): 21.

In the following review, Sage describes Dunedin as “exuberant, cruel, depressed and hilarious by turns—a manic-depressive book, all ups and downs.”

The street-theatre of “community care” and the brand-new towering monuments to recession have inspired some interesting London novels, from Michael Moorcock's carnivalesque Mother London to Penelope Lively's brittle, see-through City of the Mind—but none has quite the high-spirited style of Dunedin. Shena Mackay writes about South East London with such penetrating familiarity and ingenuity that it becomes the focus for a whole world of dreams and disasters and guilty histories. And it is done with a special lightness of touch that lets you levitate out of the horrors, without in the least obscuring them. Here, for instance, is bad-tempered, menopausal and witty Olive Mackenzie, simply getting from A to B, sometime in...