A host of short story collections photographed against a red background

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Reading lists

12 short story collections to sink into

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Extracts

Midwinter Break by Bernard MacLaverty

A haunting love story set against the grim backdrop of fear and violence in Northern Ireland.

Simple humanity, eloquently caught....Though Cal is a bleak novel, there is a flicker of lyricism running through it, like the sun shining through the shattered windows of a ruined church

To fashion a short, telling novel out of the hideous complexities of Northern Ireland takes narrative skill of a high order. In Cal Bernard MacLaverty has managed to do it superbly

It performs the remarkable feat of compressing into its short span both a doomed love affair and an account of the impossibility of living, in the circumstances of that doomed province, without redemption and without punishment… MacLaverty has a true feeling for tragedy’

Bernard MacLaverty lives in Glasgow. He has written five previous collections of stories and five novels, including Grace Notes, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Midwinter Break, the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Novel of the Year. He has written versions of his fiction for other media - radio and television plays, screenplays and libretti.

Set in the Northern Ireland of the 1980s, Cal tells the story of a young Catholic man living in a Protestant area. For Cal, some choices are devastatingly simple: he can work in an abattoir that nauseates him or join the dole queue; he can brood on his past or plan a future with Marcella. 
 
Springing out of the fear and violence of Ulster, Cal is a haunting love story that unfolds in a land where tenderness and innocence can only flicker briefly in the dark. 
 
See also: Lies of Silence by Brian Moore

Midwinter Break

An intense exploration of love and uncertainty when a long-married couple take a midwinter break in Amsterdam.

Its portrayal of the tightening vice of alcohol addiction is unparalleled. But its profound exploration of its love, companionship, faith, work and our search for meaning in life made it a tender masterpiece, and one of the year’s essential reads.

MacLaverty doesn’t publish novels very often but when he does they are outstanding.

Alive with utterly convincing actuality, this affecting, funny and acute book is a triumph of quiet masterliness.

It's an immersive and astonishing book.

[An] intense, emotionally vivid portrait of an elderly couple’s relationship in crisis.

A marriage under strain after 40 years? A mini-break marred by bitter cold weather? An escapist dream that’s about to be nixed by reality? Gloomy though it sounds, this warm, intimate portrait of ageing love is one of the wittiest, wisest novels of the year.

Midwinter Break is a work of extraordinary emotional precision and sympathy, about coming to terms - to an honest reckoning - with love and the loss of love, with memory and pain. Full of scenes that are rendered with exquisite accuracy and care, allowing the most detailed physical descriptions to be placed against the possibility of a rich spiritual life, this is a novel of great ambition by an artist at the height of his powers.

A quiet, brilliantly written novel that packs a tremendous punch.

An artist with a subtle feel for the ordinary, MacLaverty’s wry, outstanding novel about the tests that time, age and life impose on love resonates with humanity and emotional intelligence.

MacLaverty is a sweetly astute writer, a master of fine detail, compassing the quotidian, the intimate and the sacred. Midwinter Break shows us how ordinary and immense love can be.

MacLaverty's prose is deceptively simple and rewardingly straight-forward and efficient. But what he writes about in this much anticipated novel – the resilience and stress-lines of human love experienced over much time – is anything but simple and straight-forward. It’s the stuff of life.

As always in MacLaverty’s pages, everything is alive with absorbing actuality. Characterisation has total credibility. Dialogue is pitch-perfect. Both Stella and Gerry are likeable and admirable… Ripples of wit and shrewd perception play over the novel’s scenes. Intelligent relish of life’s pleasures is appealingly conveyed… Damage done by toxic ideology is the persisting theme in all MacLaverty’s fiction. And he has never dealt with it more powerfully, subtly and affectingly than here.

It is extraordinary how his blunt, declarative sentences translate the fiddly minutiae of life… into utterly gripping prose… This unflinching attention to the textural detail of minute-by-minute existence slowly builds into a profound exploration of the biggest themes in both public and private life… A remarkable late flowering... This is a quietly brilliant novel, which makes for essential reading at any stage of life.

MacLaverty draws out his characters with great patience… The comfort and pattern of their relationship particularly shine in their dialogue, which is so good it’s film-ready… Throughout, the ride is enlivened by some beautiful writing.

An exceptionally good book, beautifully and intelligently written, well worth waiting for… He writes with an unfailing and generous sympathy… Everything rings true… MacLaverty is a master of the significant detail.

Bernard MacLaverty shows a couple out of their element, so everything they see is something to note and enjoy… MacLaverty may be one of the last writers who can tell us what it is like to be a true Catholic… Midwinter Break is a touching, hopeful portrait of love’s complexity, written by a master craftsman, from the fullness of his heart.

Midwinter Break… has MacLaverty’s trademark clarity and some tremendous turns of phrase.

In this sympathetic, frequently witty portrait of ageing love… You won’t find a sharper, more intimate delineation of what marriage really adds up to.

Bernard MacLaverty’s first novel in 16 years is a heart-rending analysis of the weary affection and annoyances of a long marriage in its fragile twilight years.

A novel written with such subtlety and finesse you’re hardly aware of the artifice that enabled you to get inside the minds of this loving, unhappy couple.

It’s a very intimate portrait of a relationship between two older people… The best, and most moving, parts are flashbacks to their experiences during the Troubles.

Masterfully alternating the point of view of the book between them, he observes with his careful, forensic eye the habits of a long relationship, the shared memories, routines and irritations… Under MacLaverty’s careful, compassionate spotlight, we see the cracks beneath the surface, the way in which even those closest to us remain somehow unknowable… The best qualities of MacLaverty’s writing are present in Midwinter Break: the kind but unflinching eye, the unfussy description, which has a clarity which feels artless, but is not.

The writer’s generation will read it with wistful appreciation, and more than shudder at bad memories. Even before he shook loose the curse of Northern Ireland’s communal obligation for life in Islay and Glasgow, MacLaverty wrote beautifully. Across his wide later range his filmic gift of dialogue and scene-setting is constant.

His finest to date… Good fiction sheds light too, illuminating the peculiar facets that make up the human condition. MacLaverty’s novel casts such a glow, and creates effects that prove to be both compassionate and compelling.

In his first novel for 16 years, he provides thrilling proof that he’s lost none of his ability to tackle big issues in a way that’s unfailingly quiet and unfussy, but that ends up being completely piercing… The result is a pin-sharp but ultimately compassionate portrait of the frustrations and pleasures of a long marriage – and of how closely the two things are linked.

MacLaverty has always been his own man and his quietly penetrating insights yield many moments of recognition.

It is paced flawlessly, is lapidary of structure, and is delivered with a purpose and clarity and control that can shut out the noise of the world, of your own heartbeat, even: one of those precious books that, when at last you look up from its pages, you need a moment of re-adjustment, of decompression, so immersive is it… This is an achingly sad book, and essential in its sadness. It is illuminated with skill and application and labour and something very like love.

Over the four days of sightseeing, the reader is treated to a deep dive into a long marriage with all its quirks and foibles, and unique language… Midwinter Break may be bleak at times but, like the sun on a snowy day, is suffused with warmth, light and a lingering hope. It is further proof of MacLaverty’s talent.

This receptively low-key, unsettling novel is a portrait of what is perhaps the most difficult of alliances and affinities to sustain: a long marriage… It is a narrative of quiet, telling minutiae. MacLaverty brilliantly captures the couple’s sleeping patterns; the way non-sexual territory in bed is proportioned… And he captures superbly the unspoken nuances underscoring marital banter, the silent spaces that hover above decades of conjugality.

Sure-handed and captivating… MacLaverty’s novel is relatively short...but it feels like a more expansive work because of its unhurried pace and careful attention to each moment… It is an intimate book that makes wonderful use of the close third person… A restrained simplicity is also the stylistic hallmark of this novel… Contemplating the mysteries that lie at the heart of every marriage, Stella thinks, “Nobody could peer into a relationship – even for a day or two – and come away with the truth.” It’s a measure of MacLaverty’s achievement here that he has done exactly that.

Beautifully observed and emotionally resonant, this is a novel to linger over.

I love the clarity and sparseness of MacLaverty’s prose and his way of creating flawed, utterly believable characters.

A delicate, compassionate masterpiece.

It is hard to believe that writer Bernard MacLaverty left Northern Ireland in 1975 to take up a job and raise his family in Scotland. His is a voice that is so distinctively from here. His stories stretching back down the years can be poignant and heart breaking but are also at times distinctive of a time and place and often funny. He has not lost the true sense of who he is; his accent; his warmth; his sincerity.

MacLaverty is at his best when he exposes the minutiae of the Gilmore’s uneasy mix of affectionate rituals and barely disguised friction… The deceptively simple narrative style is subdued but compelling… The unhurried pace and intimate details magnify the distance between the couple. It would have been easy for MacLaverty to have made both characters unlikeable. Instead, they are subtly drawn, sharing many good qualities as well as flaws… Midwinter Break also explores love, loss and faith, and it at times achingly sad.

It's profoundly moving and sad – not the most uplifting read, especially when one's own parents are of a similar age – but exquisitely written and worth it for that alone.

A quietly powerful meditation on love in all its ragged glory. Subtly constructed and deceptively delivered, this neat novel chronicles a brief interlude, a midwinter city break in Amsterdam, in the lives of retired couple Stella and Gerry… The narrative power builds slowly, steadily and surely (including, towards the end, a brilliant summation of a life). Midwinter Break is a minor miracle of a book.

Why is Bernard MacLaverty not celebrated as one of the wonders of the world?

A heart-rending analysis of the weary affections and annoyances of a long marriage.

A quietly powerful meditation on love in all its ragged glory… Subtly constructed and deceptively delivered… The narrative power builds slowly, steadily and surely in what is a minor miracle of a novel.

Understated, unhurried and emotionally devastating.

By far the best novel I’ve read this year.

A tragicomic gem with rare emotional power.

With great tenderness and insight, MacLaverty peeled back a marriage creaking under the weight of longevity, drink and violence. Brilliantly crafted.

A beautifully written, perfectly poised novel... Exquisite.

Arguably [Bernard MacLaverty's] masterpiece.

From the first sentences of Midwinter Break you know you're in the hands of a master… [A] gentle, life-affirming novel, MacLaverty reminds us of the quiet poetry that surfaces when we stop and simply look

A Guardian / Sunday Times / Irish Times / Herald Scotland / Mail on Sunday Book of the Year 
Winner of the Bord Gáis Novel of the Year 
 
‘Midwinter Break is a work of extraordinary emotional precision and sympathy, about coming to terms – to an honest reckoning – with love and the loss of love, with memory and pain...this is a novel of great ambition by an artist at the height of his powers’ Colm Tóibín 
 
A retired couple, Gerry and Stella Gilmore, fly to Amsterdam for a midwinter break. A holiday to refresh the senses, to see the sights and to generally take stock of what remains of their lives. But amongst the wintry streets and icy canals we see their relationship fracturing beneath the surface. And when memories re-emerge of a troubled time in their native Ireland things begin to fall apart. As their midwinter break comes to an end, we understand how far apart they are – and can only watch as they struggle to save themselves.

Collected Stories

‘Characters all but leap off the page with believability in these marvellous stories of life (and death) in Belfast’ Sunday Times

Not since J.D. Salinger's For Esme With Love and Squalor have I enjoyed so much a collection of stories. I mean pleasure – real pleasure.

MacLaverty is one of the best practitioners of the genre we have.

His prose is invisible, free of tricks, as though it was your own thoughts.

Beautifully constructed, minutely observed, filled with the poetry of longing, told with an economy and simplicity which makes their small tragedies even more powerful and moving… MacLaverty has created an imagined Ulster which can stand side by side with Joyce's Dublin. Long may he continue.

MacLaverty has a knack for endowing the workaday with a little poetry.

MacLaverty's jaunty, light prose just skips over it all: here a turn of phrase, there a modest observation that lays a whole scene open. The effect is, as one of the characters says, "beyond rubies''.

MacLaverty is an exhilarating, tender, humorous writer… who can set a scene and create a character with Chekhovian delicacy and economy.

Compelling tales of family dramas in troubled times.

Characters all but leap off the page with believability in these marvellous stories of life (and death) in Belfast. Funny...and forlorn, they are triumphs of exactness – Joyce and Chekhov come to mind – in which time, place and personality are caught with unshowy authority and not a word seems wasted.

Bitter-sweetness is the mood of many of these stories. MacLaverty is a generous and sympathetic writer, one who is capable of celebrating joy and happiness, while remaining aware that life often brings more disappointments than rewards.

The author charts the various stages of life with engaging curiosity and earthy compassion... The publishers, Jonathan Cape, have done a fine job with this handsome and substantial collection.

‘Characters all but leap off the page with believability in these marvellous stories of life (and death) in Belfast’ Sunday Times 
 
Melding his native Irish sensibilities to those of his adopted west-coast Scotland, these tales attend to life’s big events: love and loss, separation and violence, death and betrayal. But the stories teem with smaller significant moments too – private epiphanies, chilling exchanges, intimate encounters. Each of these extraordinary stories – with their wry, self-deprecating humour, their elegance and subtle wisdom – gets to the very heart of life.

Walking the Dog and Other Stories

The long-awaited new collection from Bernard MacLaverty examines worlds in collision, relationships fragmenting, innocence face to face with real life, real death. A Catholic schoolboy minding goal has a theological debate with a B-Special; a chess game in Spain is a catalyst for grief and redemption; a Belfast man out walking his dog is kidnapped at gunpoint and told to say his ABC. . . 
 
Interwoven through the book are wry, elliptical 'stories within stories' about fiction and the writing of it, featuring 'your man' -a comically beleaguered alter ego. Acting as foils to the brilliance of the real thing, these very short pieces point up the tough lyricism of MacLaverty's work. As always, his writing is vivid, exact and pellucid, his characters perfectly observed, the surface of the prose deceptively still. It is only once we enter the world of the stories that we begin to make out the huge shapes that move there: loss, love, disappointment, fierce joy. 
 
 WALKING THE DOG has been worth waiting for: it is a powerful, honest and moving book by one of the great storytellers of our age.

Matters of Life & Death

An exquisite story collection yet from a contemporary master of the form.

These are stories in the easiest and most pleasurable sense of the word. MacLaverty's work is in a line from Chekhov, via Frank O'Connor

I have not read anything as good for a long time

Eleven exquisite examples of the genre... MacLaverty writes with consumamte skill... This is a book to cherish and one to read and re-read with pleasure in the skilful craft of its composition

MacLaverty is an exhilarating, tender, humorous wirter... who can set a scene and create a character with Chekhovian delicacy and economy... He reminds us that although life is a dangerous, painful business, we should never despair

This stupendous new book - crucial, shattering sentences - that express, modestly, monumentally the achievement of this extraordinary writer. He is in behind your eyes before you feel his thinking knife ...Matters of Life and Death is a great book. The explicit presiding literary presence is Chekhov. Not reached nor striven for, innate, rather

This most enticing of writers is also one of the most penetrating

His insights into the female mind are unique

A masterly control of pace and structure, pitch-perfect capturing of voice, characterisation that has spot on credibility, human pleasure in life's satisfactions shadowed by awareness of the ways in which they can be jeopardised

MacLaverty has never written more powerfully or with greater authorial grip

This is a fine collection of short stories, sometimes brutal and shocking, but written with a sort of underground tenderness

MacLaverty's stories don't lack drama, but their effect is subtle and stealthy: they creep up on you

A master at work...richly textured, filled with vividly humorous detail

Confirms MacLaverty's status as an impressive heir of Chekhov and James Joyce

Any book of stories from Bernard MacLaverty is a cause for celebration, but Matters of Life and Death is more than that, as it is - without question - one of the finest contemporary examples of the short story as a genre. 
 
Beginning with the sudden, nauseating terror of a family caught up in an explosion of shocking sectarian violence and ending with the white-out of an Iowa blizzard and a different kind of fear, Matters of Life and Death is a book about bonds and connections, made and broken, secret and known. Vivid, beautifully controlled and written with effortless skill and empathy, these stories are object lessons in the art of short fiction.

The Anatomy School

Bernard MacLaverty is at his very best, describing the trials and tribulations of Martin Brennan in 1960s Belfast, in this enthralling, hilarious, coming-of-age story.

MacLaverty is a master of many moods and this genial, intelligent novel finds him at his best

A zestfully funny novel of male adolescence

Tender, funny and gripping novel… The Anatomy School draws pictures in the imagination, and offers a lesson of the most enjoyable kind. Perhaps one of MacLaverty’s best and most exuberant books.

This is the story of the growing up of Martin Brennan, a troubled boy in troubled times, a boy who knows all the questions but none of the answers. This is Belfast in the late sixties. Before he can become an adult, Martin must unravel the sacred and contradictory mysteries of religion, science and sex; he must learn the value of friendship; but most of all he must pass his exams - at any cost. A book that celebrates the desire to speak and the need to say nothing, The Anatomy School moves from the enforced silence of Martin's Catholic school retreat, through the hilarious tea-and-biscuits repartee of his eccentric elders to the awkward wit and loose profanity of his two friends - the charismatic Kavanagh and the subversive Blaise Foley. An absorbing, tense and often very funny novel which takes Martin from the initiations of youth to the devoutly-wished-for consummation of the flesh, Bernard MacLaverty's new book is a remarkable re-creation of the high anxieties and deep joys of learning to find a place in the world.

Lamb

Two boys running away from a bleak reformatory begin the adventure of a lifetime, escaping despair, experiencing freedom and happiness but also running up against the cruel complexities of everyday life.

The alert and feeling realism of MacLaverty's story...had a rare purity of intention and texture... a deeply humane first novel

To deal convincingly with innocence and the impossibility of innocence without being falsely naive...is a special gift, and Bernard MacLaverty displays it with great skill

A performance of great assurance and tenderness

On a promontory jutting out into the Atlantic wind stands the Home run by Brother Benedict, where boys are taught a little of God and a lot of fear. To Michael Lamb, one of the youngest brothers, the regime is without hope, and when he inherits a small legacy he defies his elders and runs away, taking with him a twelve-year-old boy, Owen Kane. Radio Eireann call it a kidnapping. For Michael the act is the beginning of Owen's salvation. Posing as father and son, they concentrate on discovering the happiness that is so unfamiliar to them both. But as the outside world closes in around them - as time, money and opportunity run out - Michael finds himself moving towards a solution that is as uncompromising as it is inspired by love.

A Time To Dance

Bernard Mac Laverty's beautifully turned storeis are full of humour, terse realism and moments of touching or shocking surprise. Nelson plays truant and sees something he wishes he hadn't in the title story, 'A Time to Dance'. In Phonefun Limited Sadie and Agnes, retired prostitutes hit upon an inventive new way of making someone happy with a phone call, while in My Dear Palestrina' a remarkable music teacher initiates her pupil into the mysteries of art and maturity.

Grace Notes

Returning to Belfast after a long absense, to attend her father`s funeral. Catherine McKenna-a young composer-remembers exactly why she left: the claustrophobic intimacies of the Catholic enclave, her fastidious, nagging mother, and the pervading tensions of a city at war with itself. She remembers a more innocent time, when the Loyalists Lambeg drums sounded mysterious and exciting; she remembers her shattered relationship with the drunken, violent Dave, she remembers the child she had with him, waiting back in Glasgow. This is a novel, about coming to terms with the past and the healing power of music, GRACE NOTES is a master story-teller`s triumphant return to the long form: a powerful lyrical novel of great distinction.

Bernard MacLaverty

MacLaverty locates the precise point where life bleeds into art, and art into life...like the best writers through the ages, he is confident and questioning, engaged and wise.

This fine collection reaffirms MacLaverty's place among the greatest short story writers of his generation.

I can't think of another living writer whose attention to the small acts and seemingly inconsequential details of our lives unlocks so much emotional truth.

Each new collection is its own rare gift - and one to be savoured.

A stunning achievement. Bernard MacLaverty is undoubtedly one of the finest and most gifted writers at work today, and in terms of the short story he has no better

Short stories come in all shapes and sizes... There are the stories which are essentially tales... Others are atmospheric pieces... Bernard MacLaverty is a master of the second sort of story...I can't think of anyone who does it better... There is not a dud in this collection. Each story demands the reader's close attention. Each invites a second reading which in every case will deepen one's understanding...by shedding a sympathetic light on difficult moments in people's lives, he enriches our experience of each other.

Few write stories with such emotional clarity as this Booker-shortlisted son of Belfast.

MacLaverty's real skill lies in creating atmosphere, in presenting images that last in the mind more than incidental details of plot... these are stories that must be listened to carefully to catch their deafening boom.

MacLaverty... is a matchless observer of human details both trivial...and significant.

A fine collection by a true craftsman, thematically rich and deeply humane.

Can we just accept that Bernard MacLaverty is one of the greats now? In this, his latest collection of short stories, the Glasgow-based Northern Irish writer reminds us of his range and power.

The extraordinary new story collection from one of Ireland's greatest writers and bestselling author of Mindwinter Break. 
 
 Bernard MacLaverty is a consummately gifted short-story writer and novelist whose work - like that of John McGahern, William Trevor, Edna O'Brien or Colm Tóibín - is deceptively simple on the surface, but carries a turbulent undertow. Everywhere, the dark currents of violence, persecution and regret pull at his subject matter: family love, the making of art, Catholicism, the Troubles and, latterly, ageing. 
 
 Blank Pages is a collection of twelve extraordinary new stories that show the emotional range of a master. 'Blackthorns', for instance, tells of a poor out-of-work Catholic man who falls gravely ill in the sectarian Northern Ireland of 1942 but is brought back from the brink by an unlikely saviour. The most recently written story here is the harrowing but transcendent 'The End of Days', which imagines the last moments in the life of painter Egon Schiele, watching his wife dying of Spanish flu - the world's worst pandemic, until now. 
 
 Much of what MacLaverty writes is an amalgam of sadness and joy, of circumlocution and directness. He never wastes words but neither does he ever forget to make them sing. Each story he writes creates a universe.

Blank Pages and Other Stories

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Bernard MacLaverty

Praise for Blank Pages and Other Stories

MacLaverty locates the precise point where life bleeds into art, and art into life...like the best writers through the ages, he is confident and questioning, engaged and wise.

This fine collection reaffirms MacLaverty's place among the greatest short story writers of his generation.

I can't think of another living writer whose attention to the small acts and seemingly inconsequential details of our lives unlocks so much emotional truth.

MacLaverty locates the precise point where life bleeds into art, and art into life...like the best writers through the ages, he is confident and questioning, engaged and wise.

This fine collection reaffirms MacLaverty's place among the greatest short story writers of his generation.

I can't think of another living writer whose attention to the small acts and seemingly inconsequential details of our lives unlocks so much emotional truth.

MacLaverty locates the precise point where life bleeds into art, and art into life...like the best writers through the ages, he is confident and questioning, engaged and wise.

This fine collection reaffirms MacLaverty's place among the greatest short story writers of his generation.

I can't think of another living writer whose attention to the small acts and seemingly inconsequential details of our lives unlocks so much emotional truth.

Books by Bernard MacLaverty

Articles featuring Bernard MacLaverty

12 short story collections to sink into

Midwinter Break by Bernard MacLaverty

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