Midwinter Break

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. -- Justine Jordan * Guardian, **Books of the Year** * MacLaverty doesn't publish novels very often but when he does they are outstanding. -- Peter Kemp * Sunday Times, **Books of the Year** * A gem of a novel. -- Allan Hunter * Herald Scotland, **Books of the Year** * Alive with utterly convincing actuality, this affecting, funny and acute book is a triumph of quiet masterliness. -- Peter Kemp * Herald Scotland, **Books of the Year** * It's an immersive and astonishing book. -- Jackie Kay * Herald Scotland, **Books of the Year** * [An] intense, emotionally vivid portrait of an elderly couple's relationship in crisis. -- James Marriott * 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 Toibin 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. -- Eileen Battersby * 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. -- Peter Kemp * 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. -- Justine Jordan * 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. -- Miranda France * 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. -- Allan Mass

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.