Memories of a year of childhood, told in the first person but presented as a novel. The incidents forming the bulk of the book are framed by a narrative in which the adult author goes back to the village where she was raised. These incidents are often dramatic or amusing but they are separate stories and do not cohere to form a conventional plot. The book would have been better as a straight non-fiction memoir. The writing is often graceful but sometimes tends to the seed catalog school of fancy prose e.g. " a sky as pale blue as the scabious that grows with fragile poppies and the scarlet pimpernel sprawling over the marled furrows." I enjoyed it, but I had recently read Trezza Azzopardi's "The Hiding Place" and after the impact of that masterpiece of remembered childhood this suffered by comparison.

In my opinion, this is Shena MacKay's best novel. In Coronation Year, Betty and Percy Harlency, with their small daughter, April, move from London to a small village in Kent called Stonebridge, to take over The Copper Kettle Tearoom. The Copper Kettle is a charming, but not financially prosperous, establishment.

When April meets the tomboyish, fiery, ginger-haired Ruby, their friendship is instantly sealed. The girls are staunch allies who conspire together in every way possible. Their secret signal is the "lone cry of the peewit;" their hideaway is a railway carriage where they are continually up to mischief. When the two girls finally manage to pry open the door of the carriage they stand and gaze "in the smell of trapped time."

It is this smell of trapped time, this nostalgia for the emotions of the past, that The Orchard on Fire conjures so expertly. MacKay is reminiscent of Proust in this extraordinarily evocative novel and we feel intimately connected to April and to her emotional life. MacKay, usually a brilliant writer, excels in The Orchard on Fire and we can hear the buzz of the insects and the bluebottles, smell the overgrown weeds and the lush summer grass and picture the family's new home at The Copper Kettle.

The small English village where April lives is a bit unconventional as are April's parents; the duo are unlikely political radicals and MacKay manages to introduce a Bohemian element into the story in the gentle, pretentious artist characters of Bobs Rix and Dittany Codrington, who is "like the Willow Fairy in Fairies of the Trees by Cicely Mary Barker."

One of the best sections of this wonderfully-written book comes when The Copper Kettle is chosen to host a weekend party for Bobs and Dittany and their artist friends. For a time, Stonebridge is awash in fairy lights and the pink glow of nostalgia.

Although some may dismiss The Orchard on Fire as overly-sentimental, it is nothing but. Child abuse plays a part is this masterfully-written story as does sexual perversion, bringing to mind scenes of Pip in Great Expectations. We become deeply immersed in April's world, and in her fears and expectations, most particularly her horror at losing a cherished Christmas present.

Although this novel tells us more of April then just her childhood, it is childhood that is most strongly evoked in all of its trouble and all of its glory. The adult April is but a shadow of the child April and we, who grew up with her, know why.

The Orchard on Fire is Shena MacKay at her finest and one of the most wonderful and atmospheric books I have ever read. It is a glorious, heady plunge into the world of childhood that will never be forgotten.

If you are a female child born in the late 50's in South London, as I was, and if you also spent your young life in Kent, as I did, you will understand the mastery of this novel. I have never read anything which recalls this time and place in such a way that can only be described as 'Proustian'. The novel, 'The Orchard On Fire'has a particular 'smell' and 'truth' I have only experienced before in the novel, 'Wise Children' by Angela Carter. Fantastic and wonderful. Bless you Shena Mackay and thank you.

The Artist's Widow is a disappointing book. Written by an excellent author, I really expected more. In fact, quite a bit more.

In The Artist's Widow, images of Bereavement abound. After a long and devoted marriage, a painter's widow is attending a retrospective showing of her late husband's work. As she looks at his paintings, she can't help but reflect, as though her husband were also present in the room: "It was the sort of party John and Lyris Crane hated."

Later, amid the snobbery and insincerity of an inexpensive dinner give by the gallery owner, ostensibly in Lyris' honor, but filled with people she doesn't even know, she comes to have other, more intensely personal feelings for John: "Lyris felt a pang of envy for John, among the flowers and berries of the crematorium gardens. But the trees would be gathering darkness now, the reeds and bullrushes whispering, a chilly dew rising to meet the rain. Time to come indoors."

At home, Lyris takes off her tight blue dress shoes and dons a pair of John's worn slippers. "Kind boats," she thinks. These two words tell us more about the marriage of John and Lyris Crane and evoke an empathy that many writers cannot evoke with an entire book filled with words.

The Artist's Widow is a finely-drawn portrait of Lyris, herself a painter, and the emotions she faces as she rallies against sorrow, solitude, frailty, confusion and fear that surrounds an eighty-year-old woman and the seemingly uncaring, forbidding world of outsiders.

Shena MacKay, a Scottish novelist, is a wonderful writer, a true master of words, and, although the portrait of Lyris is a wonderfully-drawn one, the book, itself, is still fatally-flawed.

In her best books, primarily, The Orchard on Fire and An Advent Calendar, MacKay characterizes villains as Britains who are politically, economically or culturally privileged. They are atrocious characters and people we love to hate. Her heroes, on the other hand, tend to be misused, sparky, angelic; the downtrodden who manage, somehow, to take wing and fly. Although this may seem contrived in an author of lesser talent, MacKay gets away with it because she really knows how to be elusive, how to use sudden shifts and reversals in time and how to write magical passages filled with intensity, energy and sometimes, comedy.

In The Artist's Widow, MacKay misses the mark. Surprisingly so for someone so talented. Although Lyris is a wonderful character, her sadness is reduced to a mere grimace and the other characters are, sadly, no more than mere cliches. The "bad" ones are exaggerated out of proportion while the "good" ones are just too pat and pallid, as are the comeuppances for the former and the rewards for the latter.

One of the "bad" characters is Nathan, Lyris' great-nephew by marriage. Nathan is a young artist on the make; a man who sees that none of his friends gets ahead and whose friends see that he doesn't, either. Although his repulsiveness is patently obvious to us, Nathan, himself, feels it to be nothing less than cutting-edge.

MacKay, usually so very good, experiences a lapse with The Artist's Widow. In describing Nathan she says, "His eyelids, with a bristle of pale lashes, were tender and his eyes dull green and hard." Later, Nathan becomes "a pond with green scum on its surface."

Nathan, unfortunately, is not the only victim of language-overkill. One unfortunate woman is nicknamed "The Wounded Squid" because "she was so clinging and so easily hurt into squirting her purple sentimental ink over everything."

Even Lyris' dead husband is not spared. MacKay writes, "The last canvases burned with the brilliant chemical derangement of autumn when the slow fuses smoldering up the stalks of senescent leaves burst into mineral fire."

Despite his awfulness, and Nathan is awful, he really is no more than a cardboard cutout. And then there is Zoe, who seems to harbor some redemptive value. She however, is nothing more than a false start that soon peters out.

On the side of the "good" guys, there is Jackie, a victim of racism who is far too far-fetched to be believable, Candy and Clovis, the gentle but confused bookseller.

The dispensations of justice in this book come all too quickly and patently and the characters seem to be playing a role into which they are forced. Shena MacKay, to her credit, is not a tidy author, but in The Artist's Widow, she is downright confusing. Read Shena MacKay, by all means, but read An Advent Calendar or The Orchard on Fire rather than The Artist's Widow. The first two are really first-rate books, books that are worthy of this wonderfully-talented author.

I could not even finish this book. After 100 pages I found the whole story line dis-jointed, strange and distasteful. There are too many great books out there to bog your mind down with this one