The finest short story collection yet from a contemporary master of the form
Bernard MacLaverty lives in Glasgow. He has written five previous collections of stories and five novels, including Grace Notes, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Midwinter Break, the Bord Gais Energy Irish Novel of the Year. He has written versions of his fiction for other media - radio and television plays, screenplays and libretti.
These are stories in the easiest and most pleasurable sense of the
word. MacLaverty's work is in a line from Chekhov, via Frank
O'Connor
*Guardian*
I have not read anything as good for a long time
*Literary Review*
Eleven exquisite examples of the genre... MacLaverty writes with
consumamte skill... This is a book to cherish and one to read and
re-read with pleasure in the skilful craft of its composition
*Irish Independent*
MacLaverty is an exhilarating, tender, humorous wirter... who can
set a scene and create a character with Chekhovian delicacy and
economy... He reminds us that although life is a dangerous, painful
business, we should never despair
*Sunday Telegraph*
This stupendous new book - crucial, shattering sentences - that
express, modestly, monumentally the achievement of this
extraordinary writer. He is in behind your eyes before you feel his
thinking knife ...Matters of Life and Death is a great book. The
explicit presiding literary presence is Chekhov. Not reached nor
striven for, innate, rather
*Scottish Review of Books*
This most enticing of writers is also one of the most
penetrating
*Herald*
His insights into the female mind are unique
*Scotland on Sunday*
A masterly control of pace and structure, pitch-perfect capturing
of voice, characterisation that has spot on credibility, human
pleasure in life's satisfactions shadowed by awareness of the ways
in which they can be jeopardised
*Sunday Times*
MacLaverty has never written more powerfully or with greater
authorial grip
*Scotsman*
This is a fine collection of short stories, sometimes brutal and
shocking, but written with a sort of underground tenderness
*The Times*
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