[In the following review, Croft contends that the stories in The World's Smallest Unicorn are “unique, bittersweet stories, full of fun but far from light reading.”]

The stories of Scottish author Shena Mackay [in The World's Smallest Unicorn] are a lot more cheerful, but she too has an eye for the bizarre: an old folks home for retired clowns, a world traveler who ingests historic monuments, an eccentric old man's catalogue of life's embarrassments, an aging theatrical couple who act out the subtle jealousies of the film A Star Is Born.

Mackay, who has written a number of novels, including The Orchard on Fire and, more recently, The Artist's Widow, draws deliciously eccentric characters—Uncle Bob in “The Index of Embarrassment,” for example, who believes “that soap and water destroy the skin's essential oils,” and Tusker Laidlaw, the official Bore of the Wilderness Club. Several are involved in writing: an aspiring young novelist, a journalist in disguise on a secret assignment, a young woman setting out to write the biography of her famous uncle, an editor eager to reprint the works of an aging, reclusive author. Their efforts to communicate, however, never quite succeed, and the stories are full of misunderstandings and misapplied blame. Characters say the wrong thing, twist the truth; they lie. They lash out at one another, hurling insults they don't really mean. An incident fraught with significance for one person is hardly remembered by another. Some are haunted by words that have never been spoken.

Ghosts drift through these stories, old grievances, unfulfilled longings. Teddy, for example, a melancholy expatriate who has returned from Hong Kong to an unwelcoming family and a London he hardly recognizes, feels like a gweilo (Chinese for ghost) and longs to see “the world's smallest unicorn”—a bit of magic advertised in a circus poster. Beatrice in “Trouser Ladies” broods for years over an ill-conceived visit to the family of an old friend, the secret love of her life.

Mackay doesn't indulge her characters' sorrows. Instead she embeds their tragedies in a wild and witty web of slang, puns, jokes, song cues and brand names. References to pop culture abound, and the stories sizzle with fast-paced flip dialogue. Like the fiction of the aspiring writer in “Death by Art Deco,” Mackay's densely textured stories are “gaudily painted, glittering and flamboyant.”

The sense of melancholy in “Trouser Ladies” and “The World's Smallest Unicorn” is balanced by other stories that are freewheeling comedies. These seem to race forward, freely shifting point of view and offering delightful glimpses of the characters' backgrounds in passing, often with just a convoluted, one-sentence sketch: “Janet Richards, who worked as a home help, blamed Lily's father, a telephone engineer who had fantasized about being a pop star until an audition for New Faces smashed his dreams, for not having backed her up in her bid to persuade Lily to go to college.” The pace never slows in these stories. It's just one damn thing after another: “My father was a second violinist. He was run over by a taxi while nipping out for an interval drink, and it was a struggle for my mother to provide for us. We were always keeping up appearances.”

But, despite the incredible complications Mackay piles up for her characters, the collection is light on story. In “A Silver Summer,” a young shop girl, Tessa, meets the boy of her dreams, only to lose him when another boy, who has been making unwanted advances, tells him lies about her character. Tessa vows revenge. End of story. In “Death by Art Deco,” a young would-be writer becomes the personal assistant to a famous woman novelist. The junior writer worships her boss and mentor, but manages, through a complicated psychological tangle, to get on her bad side. Eventually, she's fired.

There's little sense of movement. The characters don't change. What makes this book a delightful read is not the narrative line, but the writing itself. Mackay's prose sparkles with precise and beautifully worded observations, often mingling the poetic and the mundane. Here, for example, she pinpoints a precise shade of turquoise: “True turquoise, not peacock blue or eau-de-nil or aquamarine or the debased hues of lacy bedjackets and babies' cardigans and velour leisure-suits that call themselves turquoise, but the vibrant stone of scarab and torque and misshapen ancient beads and Islamic glaze.” Always, the description mirrors the character, as for example when she shows us an elegant older woman's worn embroidered silk kimono, “faded from peacock to azure and worn to patches of gossamer grids and loose hammocks of threads slung between blossoms and birds.”

Ultimately, though, it is character that anchors fiction, and Mackay's people are wonderfully human. They delight and frequently move us, but we never pity even the most tragic of them because, however sad their circumstances, they have a wry sort of wisdom. These are unique, bittersweet stories, full of fun but far from light reading.