Cal

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 Gáis Energy Irish Novel of the Year. He has written versions of his fiction for other media - radio and television plays, screenplays and libretti.

"Simple humanity, eloquently caught...Though Cal is a bleak novel, there is a flicker of lyricism running through it, like the sun shining through the shattered windows of a ruined church" New York Times "To fashion a short, telling novel out of the hideous complexities of Northern Ireland takes narrative skill of a high order. In Cal Bernard MacLaverty has managed to do it superbly" -- Nina Bawden "It performs the remarkable feat of compressing into its short span both a doomed love affair and an account of the impossibility of living, in the circumstances of that doomed province, without redemption and without punishment... MacLaverty has a true feeling for tragedy'" -- Anita Brookner