SOURCE: Field, Michele. “Shena Mackay: The Menace of the Domestic.” Publishers Weekly 243, no. 49 (2 December 1996): 36-8.

In the following positive review of The Orchard on Fire, Field praises Mackay's sense of the macabre and provides an overview of her literary career.

The annals of contemporary fiction are full of authors of highly praised but little-known books. Few have produced a body of work that is as fresh and evocative as the 11 volumes that Shena Mackay has written since 1964. Her latest, The Orchard on Fire, a Booker Prize nominee, recently published Stateside by Moyer-Bell, displays her sharp eye for the macabre and humorous domestic dramas of the English middle class.

Mackay (pronounced to rhyme with “reply”) is the most mysterious of the six authors to be shortlisted for this year's Booker. This is partly because she attends fewer literary parties than she is invited to: she lives in an outer-London...