Blank Pages and Other Stories
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 12 stories in this poignant, understated collection by Irish author MacLaverty (Lamb) direct a keen and compassionate eye toward characters who are approaching death. The dreamy "Glasshouses" follows an unnamed old man who loses track of his grandchildren as they visit a large conservatory divided into various climate zones. He wanders alone and afraid, and possibly suffers a heart attack while "searching throughout the world" for the children he fears may have come to harm. In the touching "Sounds and Sweet Airs," an elderly couple takes a stormy ferry ride from Ireland to Scotland, during which they strike up a friendship with a young harp-toting woman named Lisa Boyd. Lisa brought the harp to play for her invalid father in Scotland, and after the couple persuades her to play it on board, it seems to calm both the sea and the anxious people on board. MacLaverty's tour de force is the heartbreaking "The End of Days: Vienna 1918," in which artist Egon Schiele and his pregnant wife are felled by influenza, with parallels to a more recent pandemic both clear and devastating. MacLaverty's tales come across as deceptively light at first, but they leave a lasting impression.
