Blank pages and other stories - Bernard MacLaverty

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
Tibn - 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.


'Can we just accept that Bernard MacLaverty is
one of the greats now?' Herald