SOURCE: Brookner, Anita. “A Memory of Yesterday's Pleasures.” Spectator 276, no. 8763 (29 June 1996): 35-6.

In the following positive review of The Orchard on Fire, Brookner contends that “in her misleadingly straightforward novel the author has set out a rite of passage which will leave few readers unaffected.”

It can be no accident that on reading the first few pages of this haunting novel [The Orchard on Fire] one is enveloped by a feeling of nostalgia, not for Provence, not for Tuscany, but for hot sun in a London garden, and a July evening spent with a book under a dusty tree. Shena Mackay is the celebrant of unfashionable suburbs, Streatham and Sydenham, Norwood and Herne Hill: her richly subversive Dunedin, in which her disconcerting talent was given its head, took place within these confines. The nostalgia, in the present case, expands to take in Kent, equally unfashionable, and the village...