First published in 1984, A Bowl of Cherries is one of Shena Mackay's finest early novels.

Set in suburban Britain, it follows an unlikely web of characters whose lives intersect through family tensions, class anxieties, childhood, failed marriages and the peculiar emotional weather of ordinary life. Mackay has always excelled at exposing the surreal lurking beneath the everyday, where domestic routines become quietly absurd and moments of tenderness arrive almost by accident.

Often compared to Barbara Pym, Muriel Spark and Penelope Fitzgerald, Mackay writes with an eye for eccentricity without ever reducing her characters to caricatures. The novel moves effortlessly between comedy and sadness, filled with sharply observed dialogue and unexpected flashes of emotional precision. A cult figure in British literary fiction, Mackay remains one of its great under-appreciated stylists, and A Bowl of Cherries is an ideal place to discover her work.

Abacus paperback edition. Light edge wear and gentle age toning, with clean, tightly bound pages.