[In the following review, Birch offers a mixed review of The Orchard on Fire.]

At the heart of The Orchard on Fire is an intense best-friendship between two little girls in a fictional Kent village in 1953. Kingfishers flash on the river, the meadows are lush with wild flowers and the bloom is on the plums in the forgotten orchard where they have their den in an abandoned railway carriage. Theirs is a symbiotic relationship, cemented by pacts, codes and secret understandings.

Over this rural idyll hangs the awful guillotine shadow of child abuse, threatening to break the friendship and ensuring their ultimate separation. For Ruby the abuse is brutal and physical and comes from her own parents. For April, the narrator, it's more subtle. She falls prey to white-haired Mr Greenidge, the “charming man” who walks his ailing wife's dachshund through the village and lures April into a world equally private but infinitely more damaging, of stolen old man's kisses and pathetic trysts.

There is an assurance to Shena Mackay's prose that is up and running from the first line. Her descriptions and evocations of place and atmosphere are very fine indeed. “We forced open the door,” says April, speaking of that first breathless entry into the secret railway carriage, “and stood in the smell of trapped time.” One almost hears the scuttling of spiders outraged at the intrusion, senses the light filtered through “earthy, rain-streaked, bird-squirted, berry-smeared windows.”

Less successful are the depictions of minor characters. April and Ruby inhabit a world of stereotypes whose delineation is so shallow that at times you feel you have wandered into the pages of a children's book. Villains practically twirl their moustaches. Artists are dippy and fey, professors absent-minded, Cockney grannies the salt of the earth. The local communist family is so saintly it glows with Waltonesque warmth.

April herself is convincingly rounded. She has picked up on the inconsistent moral reasonings of the adults around her and struggles to make sense of them. Capital and corporal punishment are, for example, condemned but “Lex [Ruby's father] ought to be put up against a wall and shot.” The clear consensus is that some people are very nasty indeed and deserve a good kicking. Smug in her disdain for the failings of others, April is less than kind to a would-be friend whose main sin seems to be that “she smelled of Marmite and had warts on her hands.”

April and Ruby, despite their abuse, are cocky, confident children, surprisingly well-balanced; at least it would seem so if the story were not planted, by way of an introduction and epilogue, firmly in the here and now.

Ruby we do not see as an adult but April, recalling the past at fiftysomething, has clearly suffered. The child has become “a hard-faced woman with a mascared tissue crumpled in her lap applying lipstick in the cruel sunshine.” The book's triumph is in capturing the sense of grief for a friendship untimely ripped apart almost half a century ago and the evocation of the magical intensity with which childhood cloaks landscape—the sadness and treachery of those “blue remembered hills”.