From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Orchard On Fire: A Novel |
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| Author: | Shena Mackay |
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| Publisher: | Harvest Books |
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Set in the small English village of Stonebridge in the Fifties, this is the story of eight-year-old April Harlency’s coming of age in a place where the charm of the local landscape contrasts sharply with the prejudices, vicious gossip, and vagaries of what we would now call child abuse. As the Harlency family moves from their rented rooms to run the Copper Kettle Tearoom (poorly), their ex-landlord hangs a notice on the window: “No Blacks. No Irish. No Pets.” April befriends the red-headed, energetic Ruby who lives above her parents’ butcher shop where, as April says, “I learned the fate of Pansy Pig and all her pink litter and burst into tears.” The two girls form an immediate and fast friendship. April also befriends the lonely Mr. Greenridge who presses his unwanted sexual advances on her. To escape the pressures of daily life, April and Ruby find a hideaway in the middle of an orchard where, together, they build the “camp of our dreams.”
Reviews
Amazon.com
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.
