Dunedin

Dunedin
Shena Mackay
RRP:
NZ$ 49.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 39.99
Paperback
h197 x 132mm - 432pg
7 Apr 2016 UK
International import eta 7-19 days
9780349007199
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
New Zealand, 1909. After weeks at sea the new minister, Jack Mackenzie, arrives from Scotland with his unhappy wife and children in tow. A keen naturalist, he is more enthralled by the botanical - and carnal - delights of Dunedin than in the wellbeing of his flock. In London, eighty years later, Jack Mackenzie's descendants are middle-aged, searching for a way out of their loneliness. Olive, embittered with her loveless life, steals a baby from a crowded tube; William, distraught at the death of a pupil, abandons his job as headmaster and struggles to fill his empty days. Jay Pascal, a young New Zealand vagrant of mysterious parentage arrives in London, looking for a place where he might belong.
She writes like an angel wielding a scalpel, dissecting her characters with sublime, sharp-edged prose Guardian Her prose is flawlessly seductive and comic, confidently witty and sensual -- Julie Myerson Independent on Sunday She is a dazzling sort of a writer -- Rachel Cooke Shena Mackay notices a London that passes most writers by ... Her London is not a convenient backdrop - it is the capital itself, vividly and freshly set down in glancing detail -- Paul Bailey Independent A rich feast to be enjoyed page by page as Mackay, in often dazzling prose, describes the hilarious antics of bibulous writers or, with moving lyricism, those 'surprised by joy' Kirkus What a superbly imaginative writer she is ... Mackay takes large risks, but when they come off the result is breathtaking -- John Banville An adroit novel that incisively but compassionately deploys a dysfunctional family with familiar problems - isolation, failed hopes, mutual deceit - in comic configurations New York Times
Shena Mackay was born in Edinburgh in 1944. Her writing career began when she won a prize for a poem written when she was fourteen. Two novellas, Dust Falls on Eugene Schlumberger and Toddler on the Run were published before she was twenty. Redhill Rococo won the 1987 Fawcett Prize, Dunedin won a 1994 Scottish Arts Council Book Award, The Orchard on Fire was shortlisted for the 1996 Booker Prize and, in 2003 Heligoland was shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and Whitbread Novel Award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Southampton.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780349007199
Published: 7 Apr 2016
Published In: United Kingdom
Imprint: Virago Press
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Format: Paperback
Height: 197mm
Width: 132mm
Pages: 432
Dewey: 823.914

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