Collected Stories

Not since J.D. Salinger's For Esme With Love and Squalor have I enjoyed so much a collection of stories. I mean pleasure – real pleasure. -- Paul Durcan * The Cork Examiner *
MacLaverty is one of the best practitioners of the genre we have. * New Statesman *
His prose is invisible, free of tricks, as though it was your own thoughts. * Observer *
Beautifully constructed, minutely observed, filled with the poetry of longing, told with an economy and simplicity which makes their small tragedies even more powerful and moving… MacLaverty has created an imagined Ulster which can stand side by side with Joyce's Dublin. Long may he continue. * Guardian *
MacLaverty has a knack for endowing the workaday with a little poetry. * Independent *
MacLaverty's jaunty, light prose just skips over it all: here a turn of phrase, there a modest observation that lays a whole scene open. The effect is, as one of the characters says, "beyond rubies''. * Daily Telegraph *
MacLaverty is an exhilarating, tender, humorous writer… who can set a scene and create a character with Chekhovian delicacy and economy. * Sunday Telegraph *
Expert, elegant, mature and passionate. * Scotsman *
Compelling tales of family dramas in troubled times. * Herald *
Characters all but leap off the page with believability in these marvellous stories of life (and death) in Belfast. Funny...and forlorn, they are triumphs of exactness – Joyce and Chekhov come to mind – in which time, place and personality are caught with unshowy authority and not a word seems wasted. -- Peter Kemp * The Sunday Times *