SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORANGE AND WHITBREAD PRIZES
‘Elegant, elusive . . . The writing is superb’ GUARDIAN
‘A national treasure . . . She has achieved that rarest of things for a writer’ DAILY TELEGRAPH
‘Tender, funny and wonderfully realised’ SUNDAY EXPRESS
The Nautilus, a strange building shaped like the chambered shell of the same name, was built in South London in the early 1930s. Designed on Modernist and Utopian principles, it was a haven for a floating community of cosmopolitan refugees, intellectuals and artists.
Now, at the end of the century, only two of the original inhabitants still occupy their chambers – Celeste Zylberstein, joint architect with her late husband of the Nautilus, and Francis Campion, an elderly poet. Gus Crabb, a dealer in bric-a-brac, is the only other resident until, to the Nautilus, like a hermit crab seeking a home, comes Rowena Snow. Of Indian/Scottish parentage, orphaned, without family or friends, Rowena is in search of her own Utopia – or the Heligoland of her childhood imagination.
Heligoland is Shena Mackay at her very best. Rowena, damaged but courageous, is a brilliant creation, and her path to a sort of contentment is both funny and moving. The other characters are at once utterly strange and entirely believable, and Shena Mackay’s eye for the oddities of ordinary life is as sharp as ever. Her writing – sentence by sentence – is sublime, surprising, inimitable.
‘Elegant, elusive . . . The writing is superb’ GUARDIAN
‘A national treasure . . . She has achieved that rarest of things for a writer’ DAILY TELEGRAPH
‘Tender, funny and wonderfully realised’ SUNDAY EXPRESS
The Nautilus, a strange building shaped like the chambered shell of the same name, was built in South London in the early 1930s. Designed on Modernist and Utopian principles, it was a haven for a floating community of cosmopolitan refugees, intellectuals and artists.
Now, at the end of the century, only two of the original inhabitants still occupy their chambers – Celeste Zylberstein, joint architect with her late husband of the Nautilus, and Francis Campion, an elderly poet. Gus Crabb, a dealer in bric-a-brac, is the only other resident until, to the Nautilus, like a hermit crab seeking a home, comes Rowena Snow. Of Indian/Scottish parentage, orphaned, without family or friends, Rowena is in search of her own Utopia – or the Heligoland of her childhood imagination.
Heligoland is Shena Mackay at her very best. Rowena, damaged but courageous, is a brilliant creation, and her path to a sort of contentment is both funny and moving. The other characters are at once utterly strange and entirely believable, and Shena Mackay’s eye for the oddities of ordinary life is as sharp as ever. Her writing – sentence by sentence – is sublime, surprising, inimitable.
Reviews
With what tenderness, rage, wit and accuracy Mackay writes about loneliness and belonging . . . What a brilliant novel this is
Shena Mackay is a national treasure . . . She has achieved that rarest of things for a writer: creating a world that is utterly her own
A slender, intelligent fiction written in ravishing prose . . . If I read a better novel this year, I shall think myself lucky
Tender, funny and wonderfully realised
Elegant, elusive . . . The writing is superb . . . [Mackay's] gentle mastery of language is quite beyond showy displays of technique
Around the millennium, these lives are sweetened by the arrival of a different class of tenant: Jack-the-lad junk dealer Gus Crabb, and half-Indian, half-Scottish and late middle-aged Rowena, the novel's central characte
An intriguing, witty and provocative story
