SOURCE: Bradshaw, Peter. “Muddling Through.” Guardian (1 March 2003): 26.

In the following review, Bradshaw lauds as gorgeous the prose of Heligoland.

Shena Mackay's elegant, elusive new book [Heligoland] sketches out the circumstances of marginal and defeated lives in what are almost short stories, loosely threaded like beads on a string. Her theme is elderly or middle-aged people living fretfully in genteel obscurity, but doing so in such a way that they seem like bright, observant but powerless children. This is drawn so playfully and so compassionately—and with such consistently beautiful writing—that the experience is mysteriously comic and sweet.

The venue is the Nautilus, an eccentric house designed in the 1930s which resembles a seashell and whose rooms look like a shell's chambers. Set amid heavy gravel in which an anchor and chain have been whimsically placed, it seems as if the house should be on a seashore, but...