[In the following positive review, Chong views The Orchard on Fire as a charming and evocative novel.]

You can have a near out-of-body experience with Shena Mackay's latest novel, The Orchard on Fire. In its opening pages the narrator, April Harlency, remembers her childhood: “I was never a particularly balletic or acrobatic child, but sometimes when I was happy I could see another self slip from my body and run leaping and doing cartwheels, somersaulting through the air beside me. I almost glimpse her now, running along an undulating hedge and telegraph poles' tightropes.” Few readers can help but see their other self slip from between the pages. By the time they catch their breath at this compact novel's end, they will both welcome and regret the inevitable journey back to adulthood.

Deservedly, The Orchard on Fire was short-listed for last year's Booker Prize. For American readers, it can be an introduction to Mackay, a Scottish-born writer living in London and previously published but little-known in the United States. Mackay's publisher says it “aims to change that” with this novel, yet it makes a couple of irritating mistakes about the story on the inside jacket. No matter, as reading The Orchard on Fire (and Mackay) for the first time, I fell under its spell and found myself wanting other titles by her on the bedside table. To my delight, Shena Mackay, first published at age 20 in 1964, has amassed a body of work that includes not only novels but stories.

The Orchard on Fire begins with an adult's reminiscences, when April, living alone and her parents both dead, takes a day trip from London to the village of Stonebridge. At the end she makes a haunting discovery about what has become of her best childhood friend, redheaded Ruby Richards. In between is a richly wrought story of an intense friendship that takes place almost a half-century earlier between two girls, both 8 years old.

April's and Ruby's lives come together when April's parents move from London to Stonebridge to try to make a go of the Copper Kettle Tea-room, in the same village where Ruby's parents run the local pub, the Rising Sun. Where April's parents radiate a cozy warmth, complete with a baby sister or brother for April on the way, Ruby's are ill-tempered, hateful and destructive. Although the girls create a secure world in a secret hideaway in a forgotten orchard, whenever they go back to the world of adults, the novel is gripped with nervous tension. Lurking from page to page is the white-haired Mr. Greenidge, in a Panama hat and with a dachshund on a leash, who conspires to find himself alone with April. He is unwittingly aided by her parents, who insist that she accept his invitations to Sunday tea with him and his childless, ailing wife. Also in April's cast of evil is Ruby's father, as she makes a connection between his unprovoked rages and her friend's passing references to being “locked in the cellar.”

Such harm and cruelty would today be labeled sexual abuse and domestic violence, which in the novel's 1950s setting didn't exist as neighborly suspicion, much less criminal offenses. Between April and Ruby, there are no answers and fewer questions about the infallibility of the adults around them. Mackay delivers her verdict on the irrevocable damage done without a hint of raw preaching but rather by telling the story from a child's point of view and by exquisitely preserving in the girls' friendship a corner of that world that is unassailable by adults.

For all the bleakness of stolen innocence, there is no drabness in The Orchard on Fire. Mackay populates the novel with an array of colorful characters who make the village complete, including teacher, constable, butcher and cheeseman, as well as the occasional outside visitors, such as weekend arty guests and twin professors. The sense of place is rendered sensuously and lovingly: When April's parents first see the Copper Kettle, its windows are sealed with “gravy-colored paint” and the living accommodation is decorated in “tones of meat and two veg”; they redo it in hanging spider plants, fairy lights and lace curtains.

If the author's words charm us, the pace of the story makes us charge compulsively through them. Still, the effect of the book, infused with compassion and the bemusement and unintentional humor of children, Engers. The Orchard on Fire is a wondrous novel that will birth emotions anew, age them with experience and tinge them with an aching melancholy.