There is something unsettling, something quietly provocative of inner debate, about Candia McWilliam's titles, of which, so far, there are only three. They are attached to slim works that occupy the borderlands between novella and novel, between meditation and narrative, between ScotsLit and literature for which a national tag is irrelevant. And this in itself is unsettling: that a reputation of such substance and brilliance, and so elusive of categorisation, should spring from so few pages and from someone not yet forty years old.

LRB 4 August 1994 | PDF Download