SOURCE: Emck, Katy. “Down Rabbit Lane.” Times Literary Supplement (14 June 1996): 22.

In the following review, Emck deems The Orchard on Fire as “a bittersweet, gentle novel, not given to grandstanding or preaching, but shot through with humour and compassion.”

Shena MacKay's new novel [The Orchard on Fire] opens in an elegiac mood. April, a middle-aged teacher, a divorcee, sits brooding in her low-rental London garden on one of those ruefully lovely summer evenings when every cranny of decayed wall erupts with dust-covered plant-life. Her reflection is broken by her neighbour, the jauntily-named Jaz, the author “of several unpublished manuscripts of the depilatory school”, who refers to April's attempt to stem the floodtide of weeds as “a spot of ethnic cleansing”. But for all her urban cynicism, Jaz is really Janette from Northumbria, “a damp fungus grown from a spore blown on to London plaster”, while April is “a brittler...