FROM THE AUTHOR SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE (1996) AND THE WHITBREAD PRIZE (2003)
‘Shena Mackay was a sixties phenomenon’ GUARDIAN
‘A Christmas story without the mistletoe and the message, but no less moving’ KIRKUS REVIEWS
The story begins as an ambulance pulls away from the butcher’s shop, taking Mick to the hospital after he has carelessly hacked off a finger while preparing John’s order. John’s wife, Marguerite, and two young children are forced to live with his uncle until he can find work. Marguerite has a brief affair, an escape from the poverty and boredom of day-to-day life – and John, attempting to make amends for Mick’s lost finger, is chased down by the butcher’s buddies.
These tumultuous events all take place during the first twenty-five days of December, leaving each character facing a Christmas of poverty, impossible love and loneliness.
‘Shena Mackay was a sixties phenomenon’ GUARDIAN
‘A Christmas story without the mistletoe and the message, but no less moving’ KIRKUS REVIEWS
The story begins as an ambulance pulls away from the butcher’s shop, taking Mick to the hospital after he has carelessly hacked off a finger while preparing John’s order. John’s wife, Marguerite, and two young children are forced to live with his uncle until he can find work. Marguerite has a brief affair, an escape from the poverty and boredom of day-to-day life – and John, attempting to make amends for Mick’s lost finger, is chased down by the butcher’s buddies.
These tumultuous events all take place during the first twenty-five days of December, leaving each character facing a Christmas of poverty, impossible love and loneliness.
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Reviews
A dark Christmas tale with intimations of light, this set in that unmerry old England where unemployment and squalor still distort lives, and things mostly get worse. Acclaimed English writer Mackay excels at depicting characters struggling to survive amidst random disasters and sapping tedium . . . A Christmas story without the mistletoe and the message, but no less moving.
Shena Mackay was a sixties phenomenon - a startlingly original novelist and glamorous emissary of Swinging London . . . she is regarded as one of our finest prose stylists
This early novel . . . also displays the supple economy of her prose, a style that accommodates a constant play of precisely observed and startlingly vivid images
