The Orchard on Fire: A Novel - Hardcover

MacKay, Shena

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 155921175X ISBN 13: 9781559211758

Publisher: Moyer Bell Ltd, 1996

Synopsis

Growing up in a picturesque but provincial English village in the fifties, eight-year-old April Harlency befriends an Irish girl who suffers the town's bigotry and a lonely bachelor who presses his affections on her. IP.

About this title

Review:

This intimate, intensely seen novel was shortlisted for the 1996 Booker Prize. Shena Mackay's six previous novels have won her critical admiration and a popular audience in England, but her work has not received due recognition in the United States yet. The Orchard on Fire is a concise, domestic novel set in the village of Stonebridge, where the parents of April Harlency have come in 1953 to run the local tea shop. April's private reveries and her entanglement with the grim family life of her best friend, Ruby Richards, fill up a vivid and dramatic year in the wonderfully distinctive life of Stonebridge.

From the Inside Flap:

When April Harlency and her parents move from Streatham to The Copper Kettle Tearoom in Kent April's whole life changes. Through her eyes we witness her rite of passage from childhood to adolescence. With her best friend, the wonderfully exciting but dangerous Ruby, they discover an idyllic secret world in the orchard. However, their lives are permeated with a sense of menace which is mainly centred on Mr Greenidge who befriends April and involves her in a sinister and uncomfortable relationship that will eventually lead to trouble for all her family.

About this edition

• Publisher: Moyer Bell Ltd
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 155921175X
• ISBN 13: 9781559211758
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 214