Heligoland - Softcover

"With what tenderness, rage, wit and accuracy Mackay writes about loneliness and belonging-What a brilliant novel this is" (Independent on Sunday)

"Elegant, elusive... The writing is superb-[Mackay's] gentle mastery of language is quite beyond showy displays of technique" (Guardian)

"An intriguing, witty and provocative story" (Daily Mail)

"Tender, funny and wonderfully realised" (Sunday Express)

"Shena Mackay is a national treasure... She has achieved that rarest of things for a writer: creating a world that is utterly her own" (Daily Telegraph)

The Nautilus, a strange building shaped like the chambered shell of the same name, was built in South London in the early 1930s. Designed on Modernist and Utopian principles, it was a haven for a floating community of cosmopolitan refugees, intellectuals and artists.

Now, at the end of the century, only two of the original inhabitants still occupy their chambers - Celeste Zylberstein, joint architect with her late husband of the Nautilus, and Francis Campion, an elderly poet. Gus Crabb, a dealer in bric-a-brac, is the only other resident until, to the Nautilus, like a hermit crab seeking a home, comes Rowena Snow. Of Indian/Scottish parentage, orphaned, without family or friends, Rowena is in search of her own Utopia - or the Heligoland of her childhood imagination.

Shorlisted for the Orange Prize for fiction and the Whitbread Novel Award.