SOURCE: Brownrigg, Sylvia. “The Objects of Life.” Times Literary Supplement (5 March 1999): 22.

In the following review, Brownrigg views Mackay as a talented short story writer and touches on the key thematic concerns of the stories in The World's Smallest Unicorn.

A common, self-deprecating wisdom holds that the English (with the acknowledged exception of V. S. Pritchett) are not much good at short stories; that the nation has produced no master of the form with the calibre of Chekhov or Raymond Carver. A. S. Byatt went some way to correcting this gloomy picture in her rich anthology compiled for Oxford last year. There, she put forward a convincing argument that English writers have worked against the taut, “well-crafted” model of the short story. The best English stories, Byatt claimed, “pack together comedy and tragedy, farce and delicacy, elegance and the grotesque”.

This is an apt description of the work of...