Tinged with melancholy but rooted in resiliency, the exquisite stories
of Bernard MacLaverty's Blank Pages display the perseverance of the
human spirit. In "A Love Picture," a middle-aged woman, already no
stranger to loss, consults a World War II newsreel to determine the fate
of her son. "Blackthorns" 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 savior. The harrowing but
transcendent "The End of Days" imagines life in another pandemic as
artist Egon Schiele and his wife, both stricken with the Spanish flu,
spend their final days together. And in the poignant title story, an
elderly writer takes stock of what remains after losing his life
partner.
Blank Pages elegantly probes MacLaverty's signature themes--domestic
love, Catholicism, the Troubles, aging--with compassion and insight. A
consummately gifted storyteller, MacLaverty uncovers the turbulent
undertones of seemingly ordinary human interactions and explores endings
of all kinds with tenderness, affection, and wry humor.
Acclaimed for his extraordinary emotional range and "telescopic
observational powers" (Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal), MacLaverty
captures the joys and sorrows of everyday existence in crystalline,
precise prose. Each resonant story in Blank Pages reminds us again why
he is regarded as one of the greatest living Irish writers.
