Blank Pages and Other Stories
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.
About the Author
Bernard MacLaverty was born in Belfast and he now lives in Glasgow. He is a member of Aosdana in Ireland.. He has published five novels and six collections of short stories most of which are gathered into Collected Stories (2013). He has written versions of his fiction for other media – radio plays, television plays, screenplays, libretti.
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