The nostalgia in Shena Mackay’s unsettling evocation of a 1950s childhood is stifled when innocence is damaged by domestic violence and sexual abuse
Heligoland
Written by Shena Mackay
- Longlisted
- The Man Booker Prize 2003
- Published by Cape
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A friendless orphan turned middle-aged drifter finds a lasting refuge in Shena MacKay’s curiously eccentric and warm-hearted novel
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 became 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 remain - Celeste Zylberstein, joint architect of the Nautilus, and Francis Campion, an elderly poet. But another guest is on her way…
Shena Mackay
Shena Mackay was born in Edinburgh. Her writing career began when she won a prize for a poem written when she was 14
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