This intimate, intensely seen novel was short-listed 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 teashop. 

         In Coronation year, Betty and Percy Harlency and their daughter April abandon the slog of running a Streatham gin palace, and move to a Kentish village to take over the Copper Kettle Tearoom, a charming but financially ruinous establishment. April meets the ginger pig-tailed and fiery Ruby; their friendship is instantly sealed when they burn loo roll together, in one of those curious destructive childhood rites. They are conspirators and allies – their secret signal the 'lone cry of the peewit’ and their hideaway a railway carriage where they smoke Woodbines and Gold Flake, or puff on acorn stalk pipes. When April and Ruby first prise open the door of the carriage, they stand 'in the smell of trapped time’.