The Atmospheric Railway: New and Selected Stories, by Shena Mackay
In Waterstones bookshops there are little signs dotted among the fiction shelves, to prompt readers towards new purchases. The signs suggest that if you liked, say, Evelyn Waugh you’d also enjoy Nancy Mitford; or if Ruth Rendell is a favourite you might like to try Barbara Vine. Where the books of Shena Mackay are concerned, however, there could be no such proposition, because her work is quite unlike anyone else’s. Mackay has a slavish and devoted following: Julie Burchill has called her the world’s greatest living writer.
So a new book from Shena Mackay is cause for celebration. Equally at home in the novel and short story forms, her work is often set in the southern suburbs of London or in fading seaside towns: ‘There was a smell of chips in the air and the sky was like the inside of a mussel shell above the ribbed sand squiggled with wormcasts and the flat silver sea.’
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