A Guardian / Sunday Times / Irish Times / Herald Scotland / Mail on Sunday Book of the YearWinner of the Bord Gais Novel of the YearAn intense exploration of love and uncertainty when a long-married couple take a midwinter break in Amsterdam.
Bernard MacLaverty lives in Glasgow. He has written five collections of stories and four other novels, including Grace Notes which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award. He has written versions of his fiction for other media - radio and television plays, screenplays and libretti.
Its portrayal of the tightening vice of alcohol addiction is
unparalleled. But its profound exploration of its love,
companionship, faith, work and our search for meaning in life made
it a tender masterpiece, and one of the year’s essential reads.
*Guardian, **Books of the Year***
MacLaverty doesn’t publish novels very often but when he does they
are outstanding.
*Sunday Times, **Books of the Year***
A gem of a novel.
*Herald Scotland, **Books of the Year***
Alive with utterly convincing actuality, this affecting, funny and
acute book is a triumph of quiet masterliness.
*Herald Scotland, **Books of the Year***
It's an immersive and astonishing book.
*Herald Scotland, **Books of the Year***
[An] intense, emotionally vivid portrait of an elderly couple’s
relationship in crisis.
*The Times, **Books of the Year***
A marriage under strain after 40 years? A mini-break marred by
bitter cold weather? An escapist dream that’s about to be nixed by
reality? Gloomy though it sounds, this warm, intimate portrait of
ageing love is one of the wittiest, wisest novels of the year.
*Mail on Sunday, **Books of the Year***
Midwinter Break is a work of extraordinary emotional precision and
sympathy, about coming to terms - to an honest reckoning - with
love and the loss of love, with memory and pain. Full of scenes
that are rendered with exquisite accuracy and care, allowing the
most detailed physical descriptions to be placed against the
possibility of a rich spiritual life, this is a novel of great
ambition by an artist at the height of his powers.
*Colm Tóibín*
A quiet, brilliantly written novel that packs a tremendous
punch.
*Penelope Lively*
An artist with a subtle feel for the ordinary, MacLaverty’s wry,
outstanding novel about the tests that time, age and life impose on
love resonates with humanity and emotional intelligence.
*Financial Times*
MacLaverty is a sweetly astute writer, a master of fine detail,
compassing the quotidian, the intimate and the sacred. Midwinter
Break shows us how ordinary and immense love can be.
*Anne Enright*
MacLaverty's prose is deceptively simple and rewardingly
straight-forward and efficient. But what he writes about in this
much anticipated novel – the resilience and stress-lines of human
love experienced over much time – is anything but simple and
straight-forward. It’s the stuff of life.
*Richard Ford*
As always in MacLaverty’s pages, everything is alive with absorbing
actuality. Characterisation has total credibility. Dialogue is
pitch-perfect. Both Stella and Gerry are likeable and admirable…
Ripples of wit and shrewd perception play over the novel’s scenes.
Intelligent relish of life’s pleasures is appealingly conveyed…
Damage done by toxic ideology is the persisting theme in all
MacLaverty’s fiction. And he has never dealt with it more
powerfully, subtly and affectingly than here.
*Sunday Times*
It is extraordinary how his blunt, declarative sentences translate
the fiddly minutiae of life… into utterly gripping prose… This
unflinching attention to the textural detail of minute-by-minute
existence slowly builds into a profound exploration of the biggest
themes in both public and private life… A remarkable late
flowering... This is a quietly brilliant novel, which makes for
essential reading at any stage of life.
*Guardian*
MacLaverty draws out his characters with great patience… The
comfort and pattern of their relationship particularly shine in
their dialogue, which is so good it’s film-ready… Throughout, the
ride is enlivened by some beautiful writing.
*Literary Review*
An exceptionally good book, beautifully and intelligently written,
well worth waiting for… He writes with an unfailing and generous
sympathy… Everything rings true… MacLaverty is a master of the
significant detail.
*Scotsman*
Bernard MacLaverty shows a couple out of their element, so
everything they see is something to note and enjoy… MacLaverty may
be one of the last writers who can tell us what it is like to be a
true Catholic… Midwinter Break is a touching, hopeful portrait of
love’s complexity, written by a master craftsman, from the fullness
of his heart.
*Irish Times*
Midwinter Break… has MacLaverty’s trademark clarity and some
tremendous turns of phrase.
*The Times*
In this sympathetic, frequently witty portrait of ageing love… You
won’t find a sharper, more intimate delineation of what marriage
really adds up to.
*Mail on Sunday*
Bernard MacLaverty’s first novel in 16 years is a heart-rending
analysis of the weary affection and annoyances of a long marriage
in its fragile twilight years.
*Daily Mail*
A novel written with such subtlety and finesse you’re hardly aware
of the artifice that enabled you to get inside the minds of this
loving, unhappy couple.
*Belfast Telegraph Morning*
Exquisitely written and profound.
*Belfast Telegraph Morning*
It’s a very intimate portrait of a relationship between two older
people… The best, and most moving, parts are flashbacks to their
experiences during the Troubles.
*UK Press Syndication*
Masterfully alternating the point of view of the book between them,
he observes with his careful, forensic eye the habits of a long
relationship, the shared memories, routines and irritations… Under
MacLaverty’s careful, compassionate spotlight, we see the cracks
beneath the surface, the way in which even those closest to us
remain somehow unknowable… The best qualities of MacLaverty’s
writing are present in Midwinter Break: the kind but unflinching
eye, the unfussy description, which has a clarity which feels
artless, but is not.
*Scotsman*
The writer’s generation will read it with wistful appreciation, and
more than shudder at bad memories. Even before he shook loose the
curse of Northern Ireland’s communal obligation for life in Islay
and Glasgow, MacLaverty wrote beautifully. Across his wide later
range his filmic gift of dialogue and scene-setting is
constant.
*Irish News*
His finest to date… Good fiction sheds light too, illuminating the
peculiar facets that make up the human condition. MacLaverty’s
novel casts such a glow, and creates effects that prove to be both
compassionate and compelling.
*Herald Scotland*
In his first novel for 16 years, he provides thrilling proof that
he’s lost none of his ability to tackle big issues in a way that’s
unfailingly quiet and unfussy, but that ends up being completely
piercing… The result is a pin-sharp but ultimately compassionate
portrait of the frustrations and pleasures of a long marriage – and
of how closely the two things are linked.
*Reader's Digest*
MacLaverty has always been his own man and his quietly penetrating
insights yield many moments of recognition.
*Irish Independent*
Compellingly spot on.
*Scotsman*
It is paced flawlessly, is lapidary of structure, and is delivered
with a purpose and clarity and control that can shut out the noise
of the world, of your own heartbeat, even: one of those precious
books that, when at last you look up from its pages, you need a
moment of re-adjustment, of decompression, so immersive is it… This
is an achingly sad book, and essential in its sadness. It is
illuminated with skill and application and labour and something
very like love.
*Spectator*
Over the four days of sightseeing, the reader is treated to a deep
dive into a long marriage with all its quirks and foibles, and
unique language… Midwinter Break may be bleak at times but, like
the sun on a snowy day, is suffused with warmth, light and a
lingering hope. It is further proof of MacLaverty’s talent.
*Sunday Times*
This receptively low-key, unsettling novel is a portrait of what is
perhaps the most difficult of alliances and affinities to sustain:
a long marriage… It is a narrative of quiet, telling minutiae.
MacLaverty brilliantly captures the couple’s sleeping patterns; the
way non-sexual territory in bed is proportioned… And he captures
superbly the unspoken nuances underscoring marital banter, the
silent spaces that hover above decades of conjugality.
*New Statesman*
Sure-handed and captivating… MacLaverty’s novel is relatively
short...but it feels like a more expansive work because of its
unhurried pace and careful attention to each moment… It is an
intimate book that makes wonderful use of the close third person… A
restrained simplicity is also the stylistic hallmark of this novel…
Contemplating the mysteries that lie at the heart of every
marriage, Stella thinks, “Nobody could peer into a relationship –
even for a day or two – and come away with the truth.” It’s a
measure of MacLaverty’s achievement here that he has done exactly
that.
*Washington Post*
Beautifully observed and emotionally resonant, this is a novel to
linger over.
*People Magazine*
I love the clarity and sparseness of MacLaverty’s prose and his way
of creating flawed, utterly believable characters.
*Belfast Telegraph Morning*
A delicate, compassionate masterpiece.
*Herald Scotland, Books of the Year*
It is hard to believe that writer Bernard MacLaverty left Northern
Ireland in 1975 to take up a job and raise his family in Scotland.
His is a voice that is so distinctively from here. His stories
stretching back down the years can be poignant and heart breaking
but are also at times distinctive of a time and place and often
funny. He has not lost the true sense of who he is; his accent; his
warmth; his sincerity.
*Irish News*
MacLaverty is at his best when he exposes the minutiae of the
Gilmore’s uneasy mix of affectionate rituals and barely disguised
friction… The deceptively simple narrative style is subdued but
compelling… The unhurried pace and intimate details magnify the
distance between the couple. It would have been easy for MacLaverty
to have made both characters unlikeable. Instead, they are subtly
drawn, sharing many good qualities as well as flaws… Midwinter
Break also explores love, loss and faith, and it at times achingly
sad.
*Phoenix*
It's profoundly moving and sad – not the most uplifting read,
especially when one's own parents are of a similar age – but
exquisitely written and worth it for that alone.
*Pool*
A quietly powerful meditation on love in all its ragged glory.
Subtly constructed and deceptively delivered, this neat novel
chronicles a brief interlude, a midwinter city break in Amsterdam,
in the lives of retired couple Stella and Gerry… The narrative
power builds slowly, steadily and surely (including, towards the
end, a brilliant summation of a life). Midwinter Break is a minor
miracle of a book.
*RTE Guide*
Why is Bernard MacLaverty not celebrated as one of the wonders of
the world?
*Guardian*
A heart-rending analysis of the weary affections and annoyances of
a long marriage.
*Daily Mail (Ireland)*
A quietly powerful meditation on love in all its ragged glory…
Subtly constructed and deceptively delivered… The narrative power
builds slowly, steadily and surely in what is a minor miracle of a
novel.
*RTE Guide*
Understated, unhurried and emotionally devastating.
*Irish Independent*
By far the best novel I’ve read this year.
*Irish Independent*
A tragicomic gem with rare emotional power.
*The National*
With great tenderness and insight, MacLaverty peeled back a
marriage creaking under the weight of longevity, drink and
violence. Brilliantly crafted.
*Irish Independent*
A beautifully written, perfectly poised novel... Exquisite.
*Evening Standard*
A beautifully written, perfectly poised novel... Exquisite.
*Evening Standard*
Arguably [Bernard MacLaverty's] masterpiece.
*Irish Times*
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