Blank Pages and Other Stories Review

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.

General Impressions

I picked up 'Blank Pages and Other Stories' because I needed a short story collection but other than that I didn't have any expectations of what I might be up against. I ended up loving it.

This is an extraordinary book that focuses on the ordinary parts of life from a son grappling with his mother's mortality, to a grandfather losing sight of his grandchildren in a day out to a musician travelling back to Ireland for her father's birthday and striking a conversation with a couple of pensioners... There are no supervillains or great saviours, even when a character lives in the middle of the II World War or Northern Ireland during the Troubles, everyone grapples with the same kind of day to day kindness or cruelty from their neighbours and how those small things are huge and life-changing.

I ended up curling on the couch with a cup of tea and lost myself in its pages without even trying. This is one of those books that is perfect for everyone and every occasion because every character and situation in it is recognizable, how self-contained, timeless and Irish they all were.

Thanks to Jonathan Cape for sending me this book proof.

Rating: 4.5/5