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.
Bernard MacLaverty’s powerful novel is a love story as affecting and tragic as you could want." —USA Today When it was first published, Bernard MacLaverty’s masterpiece was hailed by Michael Gorra in the New York Times Book Review as "a marvel of technical perfection…a most moving novel whose emotional impact is grounded in a complete avoidance of sentimentality…[It] will become the Passage to India of the Troubles.” For Cal, a Northern Irish teenager who, against his will, is involved in the terrible war between Catholics and Protestants, some of the choices are devastatingly simple: he can work in the slaughterhouse that nauseates him or join the dole line; he can brood on his past or plan a future with the beautiful, widowed Marcella for whose grief he shares more than a little responsibility.
A Library Journal Best Book of 2022 in Short Stories "A deft and life-affirming collection by a master of the form.”—Sarah Gilmartin, Irish Times A collection of twelve powerful and moving new stories from one of Ireland’s most celebrated writers. Tinged with melancholy but rooted in resiliency, the exquisite stories of Bernard MacLaverty’s Blank Pages display the perseverance of the human spirit. In “A Love Picture,” a middle-aged woman, already no stranger to loss, consults a World War II newsreel to determine the fate of her son. “Blackthorns” 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 savior. The harrowing but transcendent “The End of Days” imagines life in another pandemic as artist Egon Schiele and his wife, both stricken with the Spanish flu, spend their final days together. And in the poignant title story, an elderly writer takes stock of what remains after losing his life partner. Blank Pages elegantly probes MacLaverty’s signature themes—domestic love, Catholicism, the Troubles, aging—with compassion and insight. A consummately gifted storyteller, MacLaverty uncovers the turbulent undertones of seemingly ordinary human interactions and explores endings of all kinds with tenderness, affection, and wry humor. Acclaimed for his extraordinary emotional range and “telescopic observational powers” (Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal), MacLaverty captures the joys and sorrows of everyday existence in crystalline, precise prose. Each resonant story in Blank Pages reminds us again why he is regarded as one of the greatest living Irish writers.
Beginning with the sudden, nauseating terror of a family caught up in an explosion of shocking sectarian violence and ending with the whiteout of an Iowa blizzard and a different kind of fear: the fear of displacement, erasure, of losing your way - and yourself - very far from home, Matters of Life & Death is a book about bonds and connections, made and broken, secret and known. In the story "Up on the Coast," a landscape painter discovers a place that makes her feel whole, finally, only to have that communion cruelly shattered by an arbitrary act of aggression - an act that will resonate through her work and life from that moment on."--BOOK JACKET.
A single mother is torn between duty to her child and her career as a pianist and composer. The woman is Irish and her problem is aggravated by church and parents. Lots of detail on musical composition.
Contient:The exercise ; A rat and some renovations ; St Paul could hit the nail on the head ; A happy birthday ; Secrets ; The miraculous candidate ; Between two shores ; Umberto Verdi, chimney sweep ; Where the tides meet ; Hugo ; A pornographer woos ; A present for Christmas ; Anodyne ; The bull with the hard hat ; The deep end.
Shortlisted for the 2019 International Dublin Literary Award "[A] wrenchingly intimate depiction of a couple in the chilly, hibernal years of their marriage…[A book] with rare and unexpected beauty." —Wall Street Journal With Midwinter Break, a moving portrait of retired couple Gerry and Stella Gilmore’s marriage in crisis, Bernard MacLaverty reminds us why he is regarded as one of the greatest living Irish writers. Through accurate, compassionate observation and effortlessly elegant writing, MacLaverty reveals the long-unspoken insecurities that exist between Gerry and Stella over their four-day holiday in Amsterdam, crafting a profound examination of human love.
Lamb" retrace la fuite à travers l'lrlande jusqu'à Londres, d'un prêtre catholique, éducateur idéaliste dans un centre de redressement, avec un jeune fugueur épileptique.
Absorbing, tense, and often very funny, The Anatomy School recreates the high anxieties and deep joys of a boy’s quest for his place in the world. This is the story of Martin Brennan and his growing up – a troubled boy in troubled times, a boy who knows all the questions but none of the answers. 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 – whatever the 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 – as we follow Martin from the initiations of youth to the devoutly wished consummation of the flesh.
For the first time all of Bernard MacLaverty’s unforgettable short stories are gathered together in a beautiful hard cover edition containing a new introduction by the author Since the publication of Secrets and Other Stories in 1977, Bernard MacLaverty has been celebrated as one of the finest living short-story writers. Writing in the New York Times, William Boyd summoned the shades of Yeats, Joyce, and Flann O'Brien, insisting that "MacLaverty sits perfectly comfortably" in their company. The Guardian simply said "MacLaverty is a master." 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. A writer of great compassion, insight, and humanity, MacLaverty surprises us time and again with the sensitivity of his ear and the accuracy of his eye. Each of these extraordinary stories—with their wry, self-deprecating humor, elegance, and subtle wisdom—gets to the very heart of life.
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.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Prize The luminous novel by one of the finest living Irish writers, which Brian Moore has praised as "in every sense a triumph…moving throughout and ending triumphantly and joyously in its own special music." Grace Notes is a compact and altogether masterful portrait of a woman composer and the complex interplay between her life and her art. With superb artistry and startling intimacy, it brings us into the life of Catherine McKenna—estranged daughter, vexed lover, new mother, and musician making her mark in a male-dominated world. It is a book that the Virginia Woolf of A Room of One's Own would instantly understand.
Una compositora extremadamente comprometida con una profesion que le ofrece mas sinsabores que triunfos, debe regresar apresuradamente al condado que la vio nacer, Derry, cuando su padre, con el que no tuvo una relacion excesivamente buena, fallece. Despues de esta apertura, Bernard MacLaverty compone una novela de extraordinaria sensibilidad en la que los reencuentros con el pasado y con las personas que, de un modo u otro, voluntaria o involuntariamente, trazaron el destino de esta compositora, Catherine Anne MacKenna, se convierte en eje sobre el que desplegara una brillante exploracion de la complejidad del ser humano y de las relaciones personales. El trasfondo sobre el que se desarrolla la historia, una Irlanda empobrecida y dividida entre catolicos y protestantes, esta recreada con un crudo realismo sobre el que destaca el dialogo entre dos formas de entender la vida.
Both heroes and villains have lived among us for centuries. In an entertaining collection of short stories, Bernard Busovne offers a fictional glimpse into history through the eyes of diverse characters who teach through their experiences that life is often more unpredictable than not. Forty-five minutes into the first battle at Bull Run, Edmund Personage is hit by a rebel musket ball that ends his military and firefighting careers. As his unhappiness leads him to a new beginning as an apple farmer in California, he has no idea that a gift of several camels will eventually change everything again. It is 1846 as twenty-two-year-old Simeon Thatcher attempts to survive the perils along the Oregon Trail. When he spots something shiny just off the trail, Simon is about to realize that friends sometimes appear in the most unexpected ways. Hans Schuckers is an eighteenth century clockmaker who lacks skills as a businessman. When his failure to pay his debts lands him in jail, something mysterious begins happening to all the clocks in his town. A Potpourri of Fictional Short Stories shares imaginative tales that lead others back in time as a variety of personalities attempt to tackle lifes greatest challenges.
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