[In the following excerpt, Craig offers a mixed review of the stories included in Dreams of Dead Women's Handbags.]

The women characters of Shena Mackay [in Dreams of Dead Women's Handbags] are apt to get into an overwrought state: domestic annoyances and shortcomings conspire to agitate them until they lash out with the nearest weapon to hand—in one instance, a vegetable marrow. The unsatisfactoriness of life is something they all know well and resent. One spends her days in an out-of-season hotel full of society's rejects; another regrets her dwindled celebrity as a writer, and acts in a way to cause retrospective embarrassment to herself at a literary party. The heroine of the title story, also a writer (of detective fiction), has a difficult time on a train, where her overnight bag keeps getting mixed up with the bag of a woman in a synthetic fur coat who orders her gin and tonic by the double. We learn a little about the writer's past, and the accident that befell her parents on a clifftop. Did she cause it, or was the whole thing a dream? In any case, there remains the theatrical image of a handbag falling after its owner down the side of a cliff. ‘The black bivalve emitted a silent howl of despair.’ Shena Mackay needs to tone down her trimmings. At one point, we find a pier striding on shivery legs into a sea of gun-metal silk edged with flounces of creamy lace. Nevertheless, Dead Women's Handbags contains some gems, including two stories about children, ‘Cardboard City’ and ‘All the Pubs in Soho’. In the first, two stepdaughters of a despised stepfather, 12 and 14, wangle a day in London on their own; in ‘Soho’, a girl who would rather be a boy attaches herself to an ostracised twosome (a pair of bloody pansies, say the locals) in a Kentish village. ‘Perpetual Spinach’ has a workers' row of houses, an up-and-coming couple, and their edgy relations with two of the workers next door; when the latter are killed in a road accident, there's a comic implication that the couple's cats have taken over their role. Shena Mackay is a sharp and often funny observer of the deficiencies in ordinary lives.