The World's Smallest Unicorn and Other Stories

by Shena Mackay

Shena Mackay is frequently and copiously praised - Elle deemed her "the best writer in the world today." It's no wonder, considering the gallery of strange and memorable characters who populate the stories in The World's Smallest Unicorn. These include a would-be biographer who visits a home for retired clowns; an expatriate who returns from Hong Kong to find his family and London dramatically changed; an elderly woman, once a fearless journalist, paralyzed at the thought of meeting the daughter of her dearest friend; and a budding writer who becomes an amanuensis for a famous woman novelist - with disastrous results. In these feisty new tales, Mackay combines the mysterious and the everyday to scintillating effect. Praise for Shena Mackay: "A powerfully invasive writer of remarkable dash, sudden efflorescence, and earthly depth. She is funny, satirical, and yet forgiving." - Vogue

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published March 11, 1999

About the author

Shena Mackay was born in Edinburgh in 1944 and currently lives in London. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and also Honorary Visiting Professor to the MA in Writing at Middlesex University.

Her novels include the black comedy Redhill Rococo (1986), winner of the Fawcett Society Book Prize; Dunedin (1992), which won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award; and the acclaimed The Orchard on Fire (1995) which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Her novel Heligoland (2003) was shortlisted for both the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread Novel Award.

Reviews

[Samantha]

Just not for me... Not one of these felt satisfying as a short story and I just hated pretty much all the characters. Just not my vibe and not my idea of funny.

[Camille]

This book gathers 10 short stories.

While I did like some of them, some others are downright strange. I still have no idea what "The Wilderness Club" was about... Most of them feel incomplete, as if the author decided to just stop writing and move on to something else. I especially didn't like stories 1, 2 and 4, but in the end I am glad I carried on reading as I enjoyed the latter stories. A lot of the stories are related to the world of writing, with characters such as writers, publishers, journalists, etc. and also to Scotland.

I was made to feel very ill-at-ease by the first two stories ("The Worlds Smallest Unicorn" and "Crossing the Border"), as an uncle mentions his 16-year-old nieces' legs, thighs and midriff, and as an Asian-looking staff member of a retirement home is described as a "sex slave".

On a more positive note, I find Shena Mackay is very good at describing people and creating atmospheres. It is a fast, well-paced read for most of the stories, although a couple of them sound like Mackay was trying to hard when an entire paragraph is made of a single sentence.

[Colin]

Rather a mixed bag of stories, ranging from acutely observed social realism with a sting to the downright bizarre. The pick of the bunch are probably the first two - The worlds smallest unicorn (missing apostrophe deliberate!), and Crossing the border, a wicked tale set in a retirement home for clowns. As always with Shena Mackay, the stories are wonderfully readable and I was able to devour almost all of this book on a train journey to London and back. C

[Sarah]

The stories were good but felt rather incomplete.