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. 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. “A master of fine detail” (Anne Enright), MacLaverty captures the joys and sorrows of everyday existence with “extraordinary emotional precision” (Colm Tóibín). Blank Pages elegantly probes MacLaverty’s signature themes—domestic love, Catholicism, the Troubles, aging—with compassion and insight, reminding us again why he is regarded as one of the greatest living Irish writers.
Author
Bernard MacLaverty was born in Belfast in 1942 and lived there until 1975 when he moved to Scotland with his wife, Madeline, and four children. He has been a Medical Laboratory Technician, a mature student, a teacher of English and, for two years in the mid eighties, Writer-in-Residence at the University of Aberdeen. After living for a time in Edinburgh and the Isle of Islay he now lives in Glasgow. He is a member of Aosdana in Ireland and is Visiting Writer/Professor at the University of Strathclyde. Currently he is employed as a teacher of creative writing on a postgraduate course in prose fiction run by the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. He has published five collections of short stories and four novels. He has written versions of his fiction for other media - radio plays, television plays, screenplays. Recently he wrote and directed a short film 'Bye-Child'
