The Atmospheric Railway, a volume of new and selected storiesThe proportions are roughly one-third new stories to two-thirds selected from previous collections, From the washing machine that gives, at the end of its cycle, 'a little sob, like a child who has fallen asleep crying', to the divorced woman who sees that she has 'failed with her husband [because] she had never let him see that she needed him. Because she had known that he would fail her, to the painter who exhibits his work 'in the Salon de Refuses of the South Surrey Arts Society exhibition', Mackay is a writer who understands the human condition in all its tragicomic variety. Her themes are generally contained within a domestic framework. She writes about families, loneliness, railways, suburbia, cats, clothes, old age, poets, shape-shifting, the oppression of kindness and the fatal stab of unkindness.
The Atmospheric Railway, a volume of new and selected storiesThe proportions are roughly one-third new stories to two-thirds selected from previous collections, From the washing machine that gives, at the end of its cycle, 'a little sob, like a child who has fallen asleep crying', to the divorced woman who sees that she has 'failed with her husband [because] she had never let him see that she needed him. Because she had known that he would fail her, to the painter who exhibits his work 'in the Salon de Refuses of the South Surrey Arts Society exhibition', Mackay is a writer who understands the human condition in all its tragicomic variety. Her themes are generally contained within a domestic framework. She writes about families, loneliness, railways, suburbia, cats, clothes, old age, poets, shape-shifting, the oppression of kindness and the fatal stab of unkindness.