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• Midwinter Break W.W. Norton & Company (New York, NY), 2017
• Collected Stories Jonathan Cape (London, England), 2013

1. Midwinter break LCCN 2017015733 Type of material Book Personal name MacLaverty, Bernard, author. Main title Midwinter break / Bernard MacLaverty. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2017] Projected pub date 1708 Description pages cm ISBN 9780393609622 (hardcover) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available. 2. Collected stories LCCN 2013487728 Type of material Book Personal name MacLaverty, Bernard. Uniform title Short stories. Selections Main title Collected stories / Bernard MacLaverty. Published/Produced London : Jonathan Cape, 2013. Description xviii, 614 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9780224097802 0224097806 Links Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1408/2013487728-d.html Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1408/2013487728-b.html Shelf Location FLM2014 063648 CALL NUMBER PR6063.A2474 A6 2013 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1)

• Fantastic Fiction -

  Novels
  Man in Search of a Pet (1978)
  Lamb (1980)
  Cal (1983)
  Andrew McAndrew (1988)
  Grace Notes (1997)
  The Anatomy School (2001)
  Midwinter Break (2017)

  Collections
  Secrets (1977)
  A Time to Dance (1982)
  The Great Profundo (1987)
  Best of Bernard MacLaverty (1990)
  The Bernard MacLaverty Collection (1991)
  Walking the Dog (1994)
  Matters of Life and Death (2006)
  Collected Stories (2013)

  Non fiction
  Colomba: Iona and the Spread of Christianity (1997)

• Amazon -

  Bernard MacLaverty lives in Glasgow, Scotland. His books include Cal and Grace Notes, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award.

• London Independent - http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/bernard-maclaverty-the-gentle-art-of-truth-telling-480677.html

  Bernard MacLaverty: The gentle art of truth-telling
  Bernard MacLaverty is one of the finest writers to emerge from Belfast in the past 50 years. He talks to Christina Patterson about life, death and compassion
  Thursday 1 June 2006 23:00 BST
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  Bernard MacLaverty: The gentle art of truth-telling

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  Bernard MacLaverty reaped the first financial fruits of his fiction while he was still at primary school. "We had to write a composition called 'A rainy day'," he explains, "and the teacher held it up and gave me sixpence." It was the beginning of a journey that was to lead to the kinds of accolades most writers can only dream of. Words such as "faultless"and "master" are par for the course in reviews of the four novels and five collections of short stories he has produced over the past four decades."There are some writers," said one reviewer of his Booker-shortlisted novel, Grace Notes, "who are so accurate, so subtle, that you are hardly aware of reading them at all."
  Meeting Bernard MacLaverty is, on the question of authorial voice at least, a bit like reading his fiction. You are, of course, aware of the large, shambling figure sitting next to you on the sofa, but you're also aware of his mild discomfort with the whole enterprise. He is friendly and polite, but you can't help thinking he'd be a lot happier if the subject under discussion was anything other than himself. It's an impression that's reinforced by his tendency to answer questions not with "I", but "you". Asked about poetry, for example, he replies, a touch confusingly, that "What I like now... is that you have left school. Sitting down now with poetry," he adds, "you can read as much or as little of it as you like and read it right through without the fear that somebody's going to ask questions."
  Well, I'm afraid I am here to ask questions, but I soon adjust to the fact that "you" isn't me. "You were unaware", continues MacLaverty, elaborating on the shock of that sixpence, "that you had any skills whatsover in this direction - and then secondary school knocked it out of you." As so often, it was a good English teacher who rekindled the renegade adolsecent's love of words. "He introduced us to Gerard Manley Hopkins and Graham Greene and D H Lawrence," MacLaverty reveals, "and I suppose it was then that I started to write poems of a dreadfulness that it's hard to believe - "poems", he adds cheerfully, "that your toes open and close with embarrassment on reading." With literary failure, clearly, we're on much safer ground.

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  In due course, "the line lengthened" and MacLaverty "began to finish small two-page stories". "I remember writing about my grandmother," he muses, "who sat in the corner with her big black handbag. She had everything in that handbag - her rosary beads, her pension book, just everything... She would look at everyone else in the room and then she would go up to bed carrying the handbag." It was while trying to capture the voices and stories that formed the backdrop to his Belfast childhood that MacLaverty discovered that he "loved words and the weight of words". He even loved Roget's Thesaurus. His first ambition, however, was to play for Manchester United.
  In the absence of sporting glory, or academic prowess, MacLaverty ended up going to anatomy school (an experience he drew on for his most recent novel) and from 1960 to 1970 he worked as a lab technician. When a student asked him to help with a magazine, he produced a short story, some art criticism and an essay on the pineal gland. Not long after, he had a note from Philip Hobsbaum, then a lecturer in English at Queen's University, inviting him to join a writing group.
  "There were all these people in the same room," he remembers "and none of them had published a word: Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Frank Ormsby... and", he adds after a pause, "I suppose I haven't worked since 1981 and therefore I'm a writer." Yes, Bernard, I think, fighting an urge to hug him. Yes, I think you can safely say you are.
  His first collection of short stories, Secrets, was hailed by Jennifer Johnston as "marvellously good" and in The Irish Press as "small perfect pieces... the art that conceals art". William Boyd, writing in The New York Times Book Review, summoned the shades of Yeats, Joyce, Synge and Flann O'Brien, adding that "Mr MacLaverty sits perfectly comfortably" in their company. The stories, about married love, male friendship, a small boy intruding on adult grief, were all set in Ireland. They were followed by Lamb, a novel about an Irish monk who disappears with one of the boys in his care (made into a film starring Liam Neeson) and then by another short-story collection, A Time to Dance. After that, books appeared about every five years.
  Belfast in the Sixties was, says MacLaverty, "just horrible". Escape arrived in the form of a teaching job in Edinburgh, followed by eight years on the isle of Islay and then Glasgow, where the family ended up staying. MacLaverty has now lived almost as long in Scotland as in Belfast, but you wouldn't know it from his fiction. "Graham Greene said that everything that's important to a writer happened up until 18 years of age," he explains. "That is a well you go back to frequently - in fact, all the time."
  In his new collection of stories, Matters of Life and Death (Cape, £14.99), MacLaverty returns to the territory, and themes, of all his work but manages, as ever, to make it fresh. The first story, "On the Roundabout", about a random act of sectarian violence followed by an act of kindness, is clearly a metaphor for Northern Ireland, its cycle of violence and acts of bravery. It is juxtaposed with one called "The Trojan Sofa", about a child who acts as a spy and infiltrator for his Catholic burglar dad. A complex and delicate mix of a child's vulnerability and a parent's glorification of petty crime as an act of political courage, it is classic MacLaverty, combining clear-sighted coolness and compassion. It is tempting, in fact, to use words like "forensic" and "anatomical" about his gaze, words that bring you neatly back to that anatomy school. Is that too simplistic?
  "The metaphor is there," says MacLaverty, "and you dissect it, but it's more a quality of watching and looking and observing, rather than taking out a scalpel and cutting things up." On the question of compassion, he doesn't argue. "It is the way I see the world. People I think are basically good, though there are some very bad people about..."
  Certainly, Matters of Life and Death has some spectacularly unpleasant characters - a drop-out who rapes an artist on a remote island, a man who betrays his next-door-neighbour - but the vast majority are ordinary people struggling with ordinary concerns. As the title indicates, death features prominently, not just the violent deaths of a people beset by the Troubles, but also in the spectres of illness and old age. "The Assessment" is a moving glimpse into the life of an elderly woman, waiting to hear if she's going to be sent into a home. "Visiting Tabukati" is the tale of another elderly woman, one who takes her nephews on a trip to a museum and dies in the bus on the way home. Like all the best short stories, they offer snapshots of a life captured and frozen, one that resonates way beyond the immediate incident it depicts.
  "I used to think that the short story would have been overburdened with a death in it," MacLaverty confesses, but in this collection almost each one has a death... It must be your age," he adds. "You have the silver hair. You're moving into a phase where your friends are all dying... It's resignation, really. The vast arc of a life, that I started off as an altar boy with total belief... now it has taken me throughout my life to unburden myself of such superstition."
  If he has finally lost all vestige of the Catholic faith so central to his childhood, he's not sorry for the experience. "It was", he says, "a terribly enriching background. You're introduced to symbol... At Easter, one candle is lit at the back of the church and that spreads throughout the church. All of that is wonderful. The trouble is," he adds, "it's just not true."
  It has also given him a rich source of stories for his work, stories that are the warp and weft of any Irish childhood and also, sadly, of the vicious cycle of violence that has played such a central role in Ireland's recent history. "If your world collapses around you and you're a person of reasonable sensibility and self-awareness and people start getting killed, it must affect you..." he explains. "But there was the other aspect of Northern Ireland which could be very positive. The place and the people and the talk. And if you render that correctly then it doesn't just become parochial, it becomes universal." Which might be as near as Bernard MacLaverty will ever get to admitting that he's a very good writer indeed.
  Biography
  Bernard MacLaverty was born in Belfast in 1942. He worked as a lab technician in the anatomy department at Queen's University for 10 years before studying English and training as a teacher. In 1975 he went to live in Scotland with his wife, Madeline, and their four children. MacLaverty has published five collections of short stories - Secrets, A Time to Dance, The Great Profondo, Walking the Dog and, now, Matters of Life and Death (Cape, £14.99) - and four novels: Lamb, Cal, Grace Notes, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and The Anatomy School. He has written for radio, television and screen; his short film Bye Child recently won a BAFTA. He lives in Glasgow.

• Scotsman - https://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/edinburgh-festivals/bernard-maclaverty-on-the-story-behind-his-new-novel-midwinter-break-1-4533447

  Bernard MacLaverty on the story behind his new novel, Midwinter Break Bernard MacLaverty moved from Northern Ireland to Scotland in 1975 and theTroubles lie behind all of his novels. Picture Robert Burns SUSAN MANSFIELD Published: 12:16 Wednesday 16 August 2017 Share this article 0 Have your say It was in January 2001 that Bernard MacLaverty, on a city break in Amsterdam with his wife, stepped off a busy thoroughfare and found himself in an extraordinary place. The Begijnhof dates from the 14th century, when it was built as semi-monastic community for lay women. “It had this silence somehow or other,” he says. “That when you came out of the clatter of the city into this place, the houses were all round in a circle like covered wagons in the old Westerns, and somehow the noise of the city arched over it and you didn’t hear anything.” He wrote down a short description in his notebook. He has dug it out to show me because, if there was a place where his long-awaited new novel Midwinter Break began, it was here, in this moment. In the intervening 16 years, he kept returning to the story, “adding to and developing the ideas, writing and machete-ing, cutting back and adding in”. We talk sitting with cups of tea in the bay window of MacLaverty’s Glasgow home. He is keen to point out that, though it is 16 years since his last novel, The Anatomy School, he has not been idle. In the intervening years, he has made a film based on Seamus Heaney’s poem Bye-Child (for which he won a Scottish Bafta), written libretti for two operas, worked as a radio presenter and screenwriter. He has published his fifth collection of short stories (Matters of Life and Death), and a volume of Collected Stories bringing together work from over 40 years. He has also become a grandfather eight times over: Midwinter Break is dedicated to his grandchildren. The novel has already been widely praised. One reviewer called it “quietly brilliant… a remarkable late flowering”. The writer Colm Toibin described it as “a novel of great ambition by an artist at the height of his powers”. It is the story of a retired couple, Gerry and Stella Gilmore, on a city break in Amsterdam. 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. Gerry drinks too much and laughs at his wife’s Catholic faith; Stella organises the household, but wonders how to fill the emptiness in her life. 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.It also makes one aware how rare it is to read a novel which explores an older relationship. MacLaverty is 74, and has been with his wife Madeleine for a similar time that Gerry and Stella have been together – she puts the kettle on for us before heading out shopping. “You are springboarded into fiction by what happens to you in real life,” he says. “It seemed a worthwhile exploration to look at people who had lived together for about 50 years. These people are not my wife and I, and the events of the story would be proof of that in some way, but there’s a lot there that would be reminiscent of our lives.”Gerry and Stella moved from Belfast to Scotland, as the MacLavertys did, four decades ago, but the Troubles form a very present backdrop to the novel. “I think the book is also about exile,” MacLaverty says. “There are events and feelings and memories left over from the North of Ireland. The trauma of Belfast is still there in their lives, and it’s significant.”The Troubles lie behind all of MacLaverty’s novels; one can observe the trajectory of the peace process through them. Lamb (1980) and Cal (1983) were written “when the war was at its height”. Grace Notes (1997), written in a time of intermittent ceasefires, is poised between hope and despondency. If The Anatomy School (2001) has a kind of optimism, Midwinter Break is a novel of uneasy peace. “The situation in Ireland at the moment is that they have ceased to kill each other but the air is full of vibrant hatred. We see stuff like the DUP teasing the Conservative Party and wringing money out of them, but that’s within the scale of normal politics. Shooting people dead, blowing people up is not.” The Troubles, he says, have been a motivating force in his writing. “It informs your whole life. I think most writing is springboarded by anger. It’s like shouting at the TV in a way. You sit down and, in the cool of your head, you construct fiction which in some way addresses the world. It doesn’t make any difference, but it goads you into writing. When you see those boats coming ashore laden with people, or the situation in Syria, it stirs up your anger. You can’t possibly write about all of them so you address the one that’s nearest to your heart.”The MacLavertys moved to Scotland with their four children in 1975. After working for ten years as a lab technician in the anatomy department at Queens University in Belfast (the territory of The Anatomy School) he did a degree in English as a mature student and then trained as a teacher. “It suddenly struck me, I don’t have to stay here, I can get a teaching job anywhere, and the only place outside of Belfast I had been in my life was Scotland.”At Queens in the late 1960s, he had been a member of Philip Hobsbaum’s now legendary writing group which numbered among its members Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Frank Ormsby and Paul Muldoon. “There was no doubt that it was an intimidatory experience in the beginning, for me to be in among these people,” MacLaverty says. “But they took you seriously, that you were trying to write. Philip was always 100 per cent behind the writer. If anyone made a critical point, he would try and defend it.” He showed some of his poems to Seamus Heaney, who, with typical grace and honesty, advised him to stick to the stories. “He was a good critic, and a kind man. I’m grateful for the advice, and I did stick to the stories.”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. One reviewer of Grace Notes wrote: “There are some writers who are so accurate, so subtle, that you are hardly aware of reading them at all”. As someone who has no religious belief, he made the interesting decision to write about a character with a sincerely held faith; it wasn’t difficult, he said, he simply drew on his upbringing. “We were such a religious household that relics were believed in by the grown-ups. I remember being very ill when I was about eight or nine, and a relic – a bit of cloth from St So-and-so’s robe – being brought down because it was believed that it would help. It’s the way I was raised. I’ve since moved away from that all that, but there are other people who maintain that throughout their lives. I find sympathy with some of them. I know which side I’m on, but you can’t do that with characters in a book, you’ve got to believe them.“If you abandon religion then art, somehow or other, takes over. Whether you paint or sing songs or write plays, the act of examining what the world is all about is so important.” He quotes novelist Elizabeth Strout, who in her book, My Name is Lucy Barton, describes the job of the novelist as being “to report on the human condition, to tell us who we are and what we think and what we do”. “Once you have left religion, I think that is an interesting and valuable thing to do.”• Midwinter Break is out now, £14.99. Bernard MacLaverty is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival at 12:15pm today.

  Read more at: https://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/edinburgh-festivals/bernard-maclaverty-on-the-story-behind-his-new-novel-midwinter-break-1-4533447

• Irish News - https://www.irishnews.com/arts/2017/08/03/news/how-bernard-maclaverty-elevates-ordinary-love-in-his-new-novel-midwinter-break-1098413/

  Sixteen years on from his last novel Bernard MacLaverty writes about 'ordinary love'
  It's 16 years since Booker Prize-nominated writer Bernard MacLaverty released a novel. He tells Joanne Sweeney that for a writer to write about life, they have to live it

  Midwinter Break is Bernard MacLaverty's fifth novel

  Joanne Sweeney
  03 August, 2017 01:00
  Topics
  Anne EnrightBernard MacLavertyCalLambMidwinter BreakOpen House festivalseamus heaney homeplace

  Midwinter Break from Jonathan Cape is Bernard MacLaverty's new novel out now.
  BOOKER Prize winner Anne Enright gets it absolutely right when she says of Bernard MacLaverty's new novel Midwinter Break that "it shows us how ordinary and immense love can be".
  Sixteen years on from his last novel, MacLaverty has written a book, published today, that his publisher says reminds us why he is regarded as one of the greatest living Irish writers – as if we need reminded about the Belfast writer who wrote Cal, Lamb, The Anatomy School and Grace Notes, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1997, as well as five collections of short stories and many plays.
  When I ask him about a press release claim that 40 years on from his first book he has written "his masterpiece", he laughs heartily and says: "I have no idea who wrote that. And the only thing I have to say is, what about all my other masterpieces?"
  The early critical reaction to Midwinter Break seems to be very favourable. The novel is being released in New York at the same time this week, with an Italian translation already in progress. MacLaverty is back in the north this week to promote the novel at The Open House Festival in Bangor tomorrow evening and again at Seamus Heaney HomePlace on Saturday afternoon.
  In Midwinter Break, MacLaverty writes about retired couple Gerry and Stella who take a long weekend trip to the diverse city of Amsterdam, turning it into an intimate portrait of life lived and an enduring relationship, warts and all.
  While the book follows the long-married couple for just four days, readers get an insight into their life, Gerry's descent into alcoholism and Stella's need to distance herself and find a new, more reflective life. It seems a rift between them is inevitable. Fay Weldon's oft-quoted line, "Nothing happens, and then nothing happens, and then everything happens" could describe Midwinter Break, which the Guardian recently described as "a quietly brilliant novel".

  "The main story of what happens to them, the growing rift and the discomfort between them is a fictional thing," MacLaverty tells me. "It’s more about growing old, I think, and sometimes when people are that age, they might move apart – so it seems to me anyway. They have cleared all the hurdles so far but then there’s an even bigger hurdle that they have to work at."
  The couple share something in common with MacLaverty and his wife Madeline, in that both couples left Northern Ireland to set up home in Glasgow and, as with his other writing, the spectre of the Troubles is never far from Gerry and Stella's story.
  The 'jag' of the story, as MacLaverty describes the kernel of an idea that as a writer will not leave him, came when he and his wife visited Amsterdam in 2001. The experience left him with a great sense of place about the city.
  "What happens to me is that you use your own life and create a fiction around it," he explains. "There are many things that I have drawn from my own life which springboards you into a fiction, such as a dialogue, the way people are around each other, the jokes and the banter, the teasing, all that kind of thing is stuff that you pick up daily.
  "And I have rarely written something that hasn’t been influenced by the north of Ireland or about the scars it has left on me. In Midwinter Break Gerry and Stella are more or less refugees from the place they have left and moved to Scotland, and so much later in their lives, they are reflecting on their early days."
  Resident in Scotland, MacLaverty was born and raised in north Belfast and attended Holy Family primary school before going to St Malachy's College. He found work as a medical laboratory technician at Queen's University where some early writing success gained him the attention of poet and literary critic Philip Hobsbaum, who invited him to join a writers group that consisted of the likes of Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, etc
  However, while he benefited from his writing being taken seriously in the group, he credits short-story writer Michael MacLaverty for inspiring him and instilling the idea that becoming a writer was possible for him.
  "We read his short stories at school. I thought they were just wonderful,” says MacLaverty. “Therefore you say to yourself, 'He's a schoolteacher and his name is MacLaverty and my name is MacLaverty', and you say, 'I wonder if this is possible'. Because the other books I was reading at the time were like The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky – and it's very hard to relate to that."
  The father of four adult children, McLaverty addresses the 16-year time gap in his novel writing by simply saying: "I have been doing things, you know. The thing about writing is that you write about your life and that necessitates that you actually life your life. In that time, I have eight grandchildren and they come to us and all live within this postcode area."
  He released his Collected Stories in 2013 and nurtured his love of music when he collaborated with Armagh-born composer Gareth Williams to write libretti for three operas, including Elephant Angel, which was shown in the Grand Opera House, Belfast, in 2013 and tells the story of the first woman keeper at Belfast Zoo, who used to walk an elephant home to her house to save it from a possible bombing in the Second World War.
  :: Midwinter Break by Bernard MacLaverty is available in paperback from Jonathan Cape at £12.99 (€15.99) and also as an ebook. The author will be discussing his work at two local events – the first in conversation with Hugh Odling-Smee at the Open house Festival, tomorrow evening (Friday, August 4) at Studio 1A, Bangor from 7.30pm, (tickets are £11 from openhousefestival.com), the second in conversation with Dr Eamonn Hughes at the Seamus Heaney HomePlace, Bellaghy on Saturday at 3pm. Tickets are £6 from seamusheaneyhome.com.

• Irish Times - https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/bernard-maclaverty-my-life-has-been-a-seamless-piece-of-laziness-work-and-thoughts-1.3173762

  Bernard MacLaverty: 'My life has been a seamless piece of laziness, work, and thoughts'
  A wintertime trip to Amsterdam in 2001 inspired the Belfast-born writer’s new novel, which took 16 years to finish
  Sat, Aug 5, 2017, 05:00

  Arminta Wallace

  Bernard MacLaverty: “My life has been a seamless piece of laziness, and work, and thoughts, and all the rest of it over the years.” Photograph: Robert Burns

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  When Bernard MacLaverty answers the phone in his Glasgow house, I can hear a bit of a kerfuffle in the background. Is everything all right, I ask? “Ah, we’re just babysitting my son’s boy,” he says. “He’s a great wee fella. Two and a half. And we’re also babysitting a cat – so it’s a kind of home for strays, today. Strays and weans.”
  Glasgow has been home to the Belfast-born writer for more than 30 years. But it was another northern city – Amsterdam – that inspired his new novel, Midwinter Break. The book brings the reader away on a long weekend with a married couple, Gerry and Stella, whose affectionate, bickering banter conceals the potentially catastrophic fault-lines in their relationship.
  The story grew out of a trip MacLaverty made to the Dutch capital in the winter of 2001. “I had stumbled into this place in the centre of Amsterdam and was astonished by its silence and intimacy,” he recalls. He had discovered the Begijnhof, a medieval courtyard that once housed a community of lay religious women. “All the houses were pulled up like wagons in a circle. It just had a wonderful feeling. It’s a kind of intangible aura that surrounds the place. In the novel, Stella is much taken with it – as much as Gerry is taken with getting himself a drink.”
  Hiatus
  It’s interesting that Midwinter Break has its genesis in 2001, because that’s when MacLaverty’s previous novel, The Anatomy School, was published. I’m trying to think of a polite way to raise the subject of the 16-year hiatus when he brings it up himself.
  “My life has been a seamless piece of laziness, and work, and thoughts, and all the rest of it over the years,” he says. “When somebody asks me, ‘What have you been doing for 16 years?’ I would say: ‘A whole lot of things that have not appeared for journalists’ inspection.’ There have been eight grandchildren, who all joyfully live in the same postcode in Glasgow, and who come for meals and visits. This is a kind of central place. It’s a good place. That is important to me.

  “And there have been other things that have happened. Creative things. I’ve written opera libretti; that was something that was completely new to me.”
  MacLaverty doesn’t mention that he was nominated for a Bafta best short film – and won the best first director award from Bafta Scotland – for Bye-Child, his adaptation of a poem by Seamus Heaney. Nor does he bring up the witty “doodles”, many of them created on his iPad, which grace his website, bernardmaclaverty.com. He does, though, recall his delight at being invited to host a two-hour programme on Radio Scotland every Sunday, playing music, talking to fellow writers and musicians and . . . well, just talking, really.
  “I became a classical DJ,” he says. “A very oblique kind of DJ, mind you. When you listen to BBC Radio Three and stations like that, they tell pieces of informations about Mozart, and Beethoven’s string quartets, and this that and the other.
  “But I told them about my grandmother, and how she fled Belfast during the war and lived in the countryside, and she had a wee banty hen. It used to go up and down the stairs every morning. There was lino on the stairs, so she could hear its wee feet scrabbling, and it would come down – and it would have laid an egg in her bed. I would tell them that; and then I would play Haydn’s The Hen symphony.”
  Refuge
  Just as his grandmother fled Belfast during one war, so MacLaverty fled during another. The horrors perpetrated in the North during the Troubles have always haunted his fiction; but Scotland has provided both a refuge and a sense of perspective. “When I left the North, what politics meant to me then was the Orange and Green thing. To live in Scotland added a completely new dimension of left and right. I met people who had working-class, anti-conservative attitudes and theories and philosophies. I found that very refreshing and stimulating.”
  Scotland, of course, is not a monolithic place. “To live in Glasgow is, in many ways, to live among your own. There’s a great long green DNA here – which would not be the case in Edinburgh.”
  MacLaverty spent three years in Edinburgh, having landed a teaching job there after graduating from Queen’s in Belfast. “Then one day Madeline had washed the kitchen floor. Now, I don’t know whether anybody else does this or not, but Belfast people used to put down newspapers on a wet floor to absorb the damp.
  “I had just come in from school exhausted, and was teetering on a stool in the kitchen. I looked down and there was this job advertised between my feet: head of an English department at the high school on the island of Islay.”
  The family spent eight years among the mists of the western isles before returning to the mainland and settling in Glasgow. All the while, MacLaverty was making a name for himself as a writer. His bittersweet tale of two disturbed young men, Lamb, was published in 1980; Cal, his study of sectarian violence, followed in 1983. Both novels were successfully adapted for the big screen: Cal starring Helen Mirren and John Lynch, Lamb with Liam Neeson and Hugh O’Conor.
  Rhythm
  MacLaverty’s five books of short stories have seen him hailed as a master of the form. When he goes back to writing a novel – Midwinter Break is his fifth, neatly evening up the score – does he have a sense of familiarity with the scale, the rhythm of it, as with a piece of familiar music?

  “I think they’re all different,” he says. “At some point I said to an interviewer that writing prose is like building a dry-stone wall – you don’t get better at it. But maybe you do. I don’t know. But I know that the story you just finished is no use whatsoever to the story you’re about to start. It needs to be a unique event. To have a formula is not a good idea: each narrative, each story, is to be approached and told differently.”
  Looking back over the years, he adds, he has realised just how different each of his novels is from the next. “Lamb is a very different item to Cal. Then there was the switch of gender to Grace Notes. The Anatomy School was a lot lighter, with elements of comedy and humour in it.”
  Midwinter Break is different again – though it’s a difficult novel to talk about, without giving the game away. What can be said is that it feels astonishingly real. As a reader you’re right there in the airport with Gerry and Stella, fuming after the security guy has confiscated your shampoo and conditioner.
  Critics have remarked more than once that accuracy is important to him as a writer: how does he achieve it? “It begins, I think, with trying to be accurate about physical details,” he says. “If a reader believes the intimacy and truth of the world described, then they’ll believe in the inner accuracy of what you’re trying to do.
  “I’ve been reading a wonderful writer called Elizabeth Strout. In her novel the main character encounters a woman called Sarah Payne, who says that her job as a writer of fiction is to report on the human condition. To tell us who we are and what we think and what we do. I thought that was lovely and clean – and, using the word you used to me, accurate.”
  And to allow us to laugh at ourselves as well, perhaps. There’s a scene in Midwinter Break where Gerry gets a night-time cramp, which is as painful as it is comical. I’ve had that cramp. I’m sure many readers have.
  “Yes,” MacLaverty agrees. “It comes and goes, doesn’t it? Madeline seems to have great faith in bananas. A banana before bed will cure you of the cramp.”
  Midwinter Break by Bernard MacLaverty is published by Jonathan Cape

• British Council Website - https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/bernard-maclaverty

  Bernard MacLaverty
  DramaFictionShort StoriesYoung Adult
  Born:
  Belfast
  Publishers:
  Jonathan Cape Ltd
  Agents:
  Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd

  Biography
  Bernard MacLaverty was born in Belfast in 1942, and moved to Scotland in 1975, where he lived in Edinburgh, on the Isle of Islay, and now in Glasgow.
  After leaving school he became a Medical Laboratory Technician, later studying at Queen's University, Belfast and becoming an English teacher.
  He has been writer in residence at at the University of Aberdeen, and Guest Writer at the University of Augsburg and at Iowa State University. For three years, he was visiting writer at John Moores University, Liverpool, and is currently visiting Professor at the University of Strathclyde. He is a member of Aosdana.
  He is the author of the novels Lamb (1980); Cal (1983); Grace Notes (1997); and The Anatomy School (2001), set in Belfast in the late 1960s. Both Lamb and Cal have been made into major films for which he wrote the screenplays, and he has written various versions of his fiction for radio, television and screen. Grace Notes was awarded the 1997 Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award and shortlisted for many other major prizes, including the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread Novel Award.
  His books of short stories are Secrets & Other Stories (1977); A Time to Dance & Other Stories (1982); The Great Profundo & Other Stories (1987); Walking the Dog & Other Stories (1994), Matters of Life & Death (2006) and most recently published his Collected Stories (2013).
  In 2003, he wrote and directed a short film, Bye-Child, after a poem by Seamus Heaney, which was nominated for a BAFTA (Best Short Film Award) and won a BAFTA Scotland (Best First Director Award).
  He has also written 2 books for young children: A Man in Search of a Pet (1978), which he also illustrated; and Andrew McAndrew (1988).
  Read less
  Critical perspective Bibliography Awards
  Critical perspective
  Bernard MacLaverty, writer of fiction, was born in Northern Ireland and moved to Scotland in 1975.
  Both of these places, and themes such as Catholicism, guilt and tension, inform his novels and short stories. He is also the author of two books for children and has written several screenplays. Before becoming a full-time writer, he worked as a laboratory technician and a schoolteacher.
  His first published work, Secrets & Other Stories (1977), is a collection of short stories, and from this point MacLaverty has received strong praise for the finesse of his writing. With regard to a later collection, Matters of Life & Death (2006), for example, Anne Enright points out how this work holds echoes of his previous work: ‘Fans will recognise him in the details - the finer cuts of colloquial speech, his microscopic eye and an ear for noises off. All of this is anchored in personality; the distinctiveness of people being one of his great delights.’ (The Guardian, 6 May 2006).
  His first novel, Lamb (1980), is, however, comparatively less aware of these finer details as it concentrates on the surrogate father and son relationship that begins to arise between Brother Sebastian, the school teacher and priest whose original name is Michael Lamb, and Owen, an epileptic pupil from the reformatory where Lamb teaches woodwork. Ostensibly, the plot is driven by Lamb’s decision to rescue this boy who has been maltreated by other adults.
  In an interview for Contemporary British and Irish Fiction (2004), MacLaverty draws a parallel between the novel’s tragic conclusion and the violence in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s and early 1970s: ‘I waited ten years before I could write about the violence. I wrote about it in an oblique way in my first novel, Lamb, where Michael attempts to destroy the thing he loves in the same way that misdirected Republicanism was destroying the country.’ The narrative also returns intermittently to the symbolic Christian motifs through the course of the novel as both the man and boy represent Christ (as the reader learns that Owen is the Celtic for lamb). The tragic, sacrificial ending of Owen continues these parallels.
  Both Lamb and Cal (1983), MacLaverty’s second novel, have been adapted for film. He wrote the screenplays for these adaptations as well as for Bye-Child (2003), which he also directed. This short film is based on a poem by Seamus Heaney. He is also given the writing credits for Elephant (1989), which was directed by Alan Clarke, and is believed to have inspired the title when he compared the continuing sectarian violence in Northern Ireland to having an elephant in the room.
  This second novel is as emotionally perceptive as the first, but has the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland as a dominant theme. The plot is driven by the love between the eponymous young Catholic man and the widow of a Protestant police reservist he helped to murder. Sacrifice and guilt are recurrent areas of interest once more as Cal is unable to come to terms fully with what he has done. His desire for punishment is a register of his Catholic heritage and a measure of the sin he has committed; but, the narrative also makes it transparent that Cal is another victim of his environment.
  Following three further collections of short stories, which include The Great Profundo and Other Stories (1987), the well-researched novel, Grace Notes, was published in 1997. This latter work was highly acclaimed; it won the 1997 Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Its construction and content are influenced by concepts of harmony and music and this musicality is channelled through the central character, Catherine McKenna, who is a composer.
  The religious divides in Northern Ireland are once more at the forefront as Catherine attempts to re-negotiate her dead father’s hatred for the symbols of Protestantism. In the essay ‘The Novel in Ireland and Scotland’ by Gerard Carruthers, which is included in A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945-2000 (2005), the importance of Catherine’s decision to re-appropriate the sound of the drums of the Orange marches, which her father hated, is explained: ‘At the heart of the novel is the public performance in a converted church in Glasgow of Catherine’s composition incorporating the drums of the Orange Order, which her background ought to make her despise.’ Music offers the possibility of joy, as well as being an intended lament for past brutalities.
  MacLaverty’s next novel, The Anatomy School (2001), is set in Belfast in the late 1960s and although still concerned with sectarianism in Northern Ireland, it differs from the earlier works in that it invokes humour more noticeably. The main character is a Catholic schoolboy, Martin Brennan, and his typical male adolescent worries are the main source of interest. Male adolescent friendships are focussed upon, as is sex and the anxiety of failing exams. In an interview with The Barcelona Review (December 2006), he explains that although this is not an autobiographical novel, many of the details such as the description of the school are drawn from his life and, of all his characters, Martin is the one that most resembles him. He then reiterates that this is not an autobiography, when he quotes a pupil he used to teach who described fiction as ‘made-up truth’.
  Acclaim for MacLaverty’s writing continues, with Matters of Life & Death inspiring reviewers to compare him favourably with authors such as Chekhov, James Joyce and Graham Greene. This is a tender collection that also uses the horrors of violence to capture the attention of the reader. As with his previous novels and stories, MacLaverty continues to demonstrate the value he places on searching for emotional honesty. Looking back at his work, it is apparent that he has also accepted the political nature of writing. Throughout his writing career he has engaged with the long-term effects of British imperialism, the influence of Catholicism and the damage caused by sectarian violence.
  Dr Julie Ellam, 2006.
  Read less
  Bibliography
  2013
  Collected Stories
  2006
  Matters of Life & Death
  2001
  The Anatomy School
  1997
  Grace Notes
  1994
  Walking the Dog & Other Stories
  1991
  The MacLaverty Collection
  1990
  The Best of Bernard Maclaverty
  1988
  Andrew McAndrew
  1987
  The Great Profundo & Other Stories
  1983
  Cal
  1982
  A Time to Dance & Other Stories
  1980
  Lamb
  1978
  A Man in Search of a Pet
  1977
  Secrets & Other Stories
  Awards
  2005
  The Lord Provost of Glasgow's Award for Literature
  2004
  BAFTA Scotland
  2003
  BAFTA
  2002
  Creative Scotland Award
  2001
  Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award
  1997
  Booker Prize for Fiction
  1997
  Kerry Ingredients Book of the Year
  1997
  MIND Book of the Year Award
  1997
  Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award
  1997
  Stakis Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year
  1997
  Whitbread Novel Award
  1997
  Writers' Guild Award (Best Fiction)
  1994
  Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award
  1994
  Society of Authors Travel Award
  1988
  Irish Post Literature Award
  1988
  McVitie's Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year
  1987
  Lucarno Film Festival
  1984
  Evening Standard Award for Best Screenplay
  1983
  Irish Sunday Independent Arts Award
  1981
  Guardian Fiction Prize
  1981
  Pharic McLaren Award (Best Radio Play)
  1981
  Pye Radio Award

• Wikipedia -

  Bernard MacLaverty
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  This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (September 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
  Bernard MacLaverty
  Born
  14 September 1942 (age 75)
  Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom
  Occupation
  Novelist, playwright, screenwriter, short story writer, librettist
  Education
  Holy Family Primary School Belfast
  Alma mater
  Queen's University Belfast
  Notable works
  Lamb,
  Cal,
  Grace Notes,
  The Anatomy School
  Website
  www.bernardmaclaverty.com
  Bernard MacLaverty (born 14 September 1942) is a Northern Irish writer of fiction. His novels include Lamb, Cal, Grace Notes and The Anatomy School. He has written five books of short stories.

  Contents [hide]
  1
  Biography
  2
  Work
  3
  List of published works
  4
  See also
  5
  External links

  Biography[edit]
  MacLaverty was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland and educated at Holy Family Primary School in the Duncairn district and then at St Malachy's College. He worked as a medical laboratory technician and was a mature student at Queen's University Belfast. He lived there until 1975 when he moved to Scotland with his wife, Madeline, and four children (Ciara, Claire, John, and Jude). He currently lives in Glasgow.
  He was Writer-in-Residence at the Universities of Aberdeen, Liverpool John Moores, Augsburg and Iowa State. He was the Ireland Fund Artist-in-Residence in the Celtic Studies Department of St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto in October of 2007.[1]
  Work[edit]
  MacLaverty's Lamb is a novel about faith, relationships and ultimately, love; Cal is an examination of love in the midst of Irish violence. Grace Notes, which was shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize, is about the conflict between a desire to compose and motherhood. The Anatomy School is a comic coming-of-age novel. He has also written five acclaimed collections of short stories, most of which are in his 'Collected Stories' (Cape 2013).
  MacLaverty wrote a screenplay for Cal in 1984; Helen Mirren and John Lynch starred and Mark Knopfler composed the film soundtrack. He also adapted Lamb for the screen; Liam Neeson and Hugh O'Conor starred and Van Morrison composed the soundtrack.
  He has written versions of his fiction for other media - radio plays, television plays, screenplays and libretti. In 2003 he wrote and directed a short film "Bye-Child" (BAFTA nominated for ‘Best Short Film’) and more recently wrote libretti for Scottish Opera’s Five:15 series - ‘The King’s Conjecture’ with music by Gareth Williams and 'The Letter' with music by Vitaly Khodosh. For Scottish Opera in 2012, and again with music by Gareth Williams, he wrote 'The Elephant Angel', an opera for schools which toured Scotland and Northern Ireland.
  List of published works[edit]
  Secrets & Other Stories Blackstaff Press (1977)
  Lamb Cape /Blackstaff Press (1980)
  A Time to Dance & Other Stories Cape /Blackstaff Press (1982)
  Cal Cape /Blackstaff Press (1983)
  The Great Profundo & Other Stories Cape /Blackstaff Press (1987)
  Walking the Dog & Other Stories Cape /Blackstaff Press (1994)
  Grace Notes Cape /Blackstaff Press (1997)
  The Anatomy School Cape/Blackstaff Press (2001)
  Matters of Life & Death & Other Stories Cape (2006)
  Collected Stories Cape (2013)
  Midwinter Break: A Novel, W. W. Norton & Company (2017)

• London Observer - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/31/bernard-maclaverty-interview-new-novel-midwinter-break

  Bernard MacLaverty: ‘The story you have just finished is of little help to writing the next one’
  Acclaimed Northern Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty has taken 16 years to finish his latest novel. A lot of things just got in the way, he says

  ‘You know whether you can accomplish a story in six pages or whether it will take 200’: Bernard MacLaverty in London last month. Photograph: Richard Saker for the Observer

  Peter Stanford
  Monday 31 July 2017 08.00 BST
  Last modified on Saturday 2 December 2017 14.25 GMT

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  n his jacket endorsement for Bernard MacLaverty’s Midwinter Break, the celebrated American novelist Richard Ford describes the new book as “much-anticipated”. It is a polite way of saying that MacLaverty’s fifth novel has taken its time in coming. Sixteen years, to be precise, since his last, The Anatomy School, and longer still if you go back to the glory days of the 1980s and 1990s when this Belfast-born but Glasgow-based writer was everywhere, winning plaudits and prizes in equal measure for his short story collections (A Time to Dance, Walking the Dog and The Great Profundo), his novels Cal and Lamb, both of which he adapted as acclaimed films starring respectively Helen Mirren and Liam Neeson, his television series and radio plays, and his Booker-shortlisted Grace Notes in 1997.
  A case of writer’s block? More life getting in the way of art, MacLaverty replies, perched nervously on the edge of his armchair in a central London hotel as we talk. “I have a diary note from 2001, when Madeline [his wife] and I went to Amsterdam for a break in January. So I presume I was starting to think about the project from there, but there were so many things that came along to get in the way.”

  One of the things you know is that you are not telling your own story, but bits of it are your own story

  Among the distractions he lists – and this affable and unassuming 74-year-old has a prompt sheet to hand – were: an un-turn-downable invitation from Scottish Opera to write a libretto; two years as a “classical music DJ” on Radio Scotland; a five-year stint on a movie script based on Robin Jenkins’s “wonderful” 1950s novel, The Cone Gatherers, which finally came to nought when the producer behind the project died; a collection of short stories; and Bye-Child, a Bafta-nominated short film of a poem by his close friend Seamus Heaney, which he directed in 2003.
  “And,” he adds, “I’ve also had eight grandchildren in that time. Or we have.” His four grown-up children, two boys, two girls, “all live in the same postcode” as he does, so he has his hands full. It’s a new twist on Cyril Connolly’s line about the pram in the hall being the enemy of good art.
  MacLaverty would be the last one to take himself so seriously, but his brief run through those 16 “lost” years reveals him as a man of many talents – to which should be also added teaching stints at British, European and American universities. With so much he is good at, what would he choose if he had only time left for one more project? “I’d paint something good,” he answers without a pause.
  No hint of any autumnal narrowing of horizons here, but Midwinter Break is, by contrast, a tale of quiet disappointment, about long-married Gerry Gilmore, a retired architect, and his wife Stella, as they head off on a mini-break. Both are at odds with their lot and with each other. He is retreating into drink, she into religion.
  “She is thinking,” MacLaverty says, “on a different plain. This is not a story about old people. It’s the story of two young people who got old and they have fallen out of step.”

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  A two-hander, it covers the same broad territory as 45 Years, the 2015 Tom Courtenay/Charlotte Rampling film, based on a David Constantine short story. In the case of Midwinter Break, though, the past trauma that haunts the couple is bound up in the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which they moved to Scotland to escape.
  The parallels with MacLaverty’s life are plain. In 1974, he, too, made the same “refugee” journey with his young family. “The Troubles were awful and bloody,” he recalls, “bombs and people being killed on their doorsteps.”
  His homeland, though, has continued to loom large in the books he has published in exile. “You write from what you know, and one of the things you know is that you are not telling your own story, but bits of it are your own story. It’s like tessellation of a mosaic. You take a bit that happened to you and you put it beside a bit that you make up.”
  It requires a delicate touch, he emphasises, and can be a time-consuming process. We are edging back around to that long space between novels but now he is more willing to address what has been “keeping me back”. Whatever backdrop, or even tone his books may share, he explains, “the story you have just finished is of little help to writing the next one”. He quotes Thomas Mann in his defence. “Didn’t he say, ‘a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people’?”
  There was at least one false start with Midwinter Break, he admits, with an opening section, set in the now derelict modernist Catholic seminary at Cardross in Argyll and Bute, that had to be scrapped.

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  Is he a perfectionist? MacLaverty gives a warm, intimate laugh. “I’m a writer. They’re the same thing.”
  Religion is one feature of his novels. Though he long ago rejected the Catholicism of his childhood, it continues to fuel his imagination. “I cease to believe in one aspect of it, but I continue to believe in the trappings.”
  Another hallmark is the spareness of his writing, not a wasted word or detail between the covers of what become as a result small masterpieces. “It’s not like putting together Lego,” he agrees. “You have to be very careful that you are weighing the words.”
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  The phrase makes him remember something his mother once used. “She’d found a wee dead bird. She picked it up and she said, ‘you’d have known by the weight of it that it was dead’.” He chuckles. “And it’s the same with a story. You know whether you can accomplish it in six pages [as a short story] or whether it will take 200. And this one” – he points to the copy of Midwinter Break on the table between us – “is hefty material. It is about love and life and death and religion and what matters.”
  And then, of course, there’s his other recurring theme, Ireland. “All the novels nod to what is happening to Ireland,” he agrees. “Lamb [1980] was at the worst of the Troubles. Cal [1983] also had a downbeat ending, but then there were the ceasefires and things began to mend. So Grace Notes had an upbeat middle, and a downbeat end, or two endings. I was hedging my bets. And this one… well, I mustn’t say more about the ending, but I’m mildly optimistic about Ireland. I don’t think they are going to go back to slaying each other.”
  • Midwinter Break by Bernard MacLaverty will be published by Jonathan Cape on 3 August (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

• Bernard MacLaverty Website - http://www.bernardmaclaverty.com/

  Bernard MacLaverty was born in Belfast (14.9.42) and lived there until 1975 when he moved to Scotland with his wife, Madeline, and four children. He has been a Medical Laboratory Technician, a mature student, a teacher of English and occasionally a Writer-in-Residence (Universities of Aberdeen, Augsburg, Liverpool John Moore’s and Iowa State). After living for a time in Edinburgh and the Isle of Islay he now lives in Glasgow. He is a member of Aosdana in Ireland.
  He has published four novels and five collections of short stories most of which are gathered into Collected Stories (2013). He has written versions of his fiction for other media - radio plays, television plays, screenplays, libretti.

Midwinter Break

Arlene McKanic
(Sept. 2017): p18.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
By Bernard MacLaverty
Norton
$24.95, 208 pages ISBN 9780393609622 Audio, eBook available
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
It takes a brilliant writer indeed to spin the straw of everyday life into gold, and Bernard MacLaverty is such a writer. After reading his latest, Midwinter Break, you won't wonder why he was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for his 1997 novel, Grace Notes. This tale of two ordinary pensioners satisfies in ways that a really good book should: The characters are memorable, the writing is luminous and you never want it to end.

Did I say the couple in the story is ordinary? They are and they aren't. There's Gerry Gilmore, who was an architect, and his wife, Stella, a former schoolteacher. They live in Glasgow, Scotland, and when the book opens they're preparing to go on a four-day winter vacation to Amsterdam. Stella is a font of goodness: interested, quietly intelligent, brimful of love and compassion. Gerry is smart and a bit stodgy. He's funny and loves his wife. He's also an alcoholic. One of the reasons they're going to Amsterdam is for Stella to figure out whether she can keep on living with him. It's a midwinter break in more ways than one.
MacLaverty is superb when it comes to revealing the minutiae of a long-married couple's life: Stella remembering to put in her eye drops to ease her dry eyes; their custom of chastely kissing in elevators; their bedtime rituals; Gerry thinking up ways to hide how much he's drinking, even though the perceptive Stella knows the truth. MacLaverty layers on these particulars until we come to deeply know these people. The reader begins to think, I hope nothing happens that'll make me not love them! Nothing does, but the reader does learn of the primal wound that knocked this relationship just a bit askew. It happened early in their marriage, was unforgivably atrocious and not in any way their fault. Yet it may have set Gerry to his drinking problem and certainly troubled Stella's strong Catholic faith.
Midwinter Break is a slim book, which proves you don't have to write a Middlemarch-esque door-stopper to produce a masterpiece. This quietly passionate, knowing novel is bound to be read and savored for years to come.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
McKanic, Arlene. "Midwinter Break." BookPage, Sept. 2017, p. 18. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502517412/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2c1a571f. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A502517412

Midwinter Break

Mark Levine
113.21 (July 1, 2017): p22.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Midwinter Break.
By Bernard MacLaverty.
Aug. 2017.208p. Norton, $24.95 (9780393609622).
In this short, rich, and precisely written novel, acclaimed author MacLaverty examines an "ordinary" marriage in crisis. Stella and her longtime husband, retired engineer Gerry, take a holiday in Amsterdam, during which it becomes clear that Stella is experiencing a spiritual crisis (her attachment to the Catholic Church runs much deeper than her husband's does); Gerry, for his part, has a growing problem with alcohol. Like MacLaverty, Gerry and Stella are Northern Irish living in Scotland, and "the troubles" have played a large role in their lives, while the repercussions linger. In this finely detailed rendering of a couple's virtues and foibles, there are numerous outstanding, jewel-like scenes, including one at the Anne Frank House and another at a women's center that Stella is considering joining. The novel's "happy" ending may not ring quite true, but on the whole this is a satisfying, thoroughly enjoyable, and even at times tongue-clucking read.--Mark Levine
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Levine, Mark. "Midwinter Break." Booklist, 1 July 2017, p. 22. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499862696/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ad93321d. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A499862696

Scenes from a marriage

Douglas Kennedy
146.5380 (Aug. 18, 2017): p49.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Midwinter Break
Bernard MacLaverty
Jonathan Cape, 243pp. 14.99 [pounds sterling]
As Somerset Maugham once noted: "There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are." Similarly, for a working novelist, the oft-posed question "How long did it take you to write your last book?" can be a vertiginous one. Any answer you give is going to raise more questions. If you say that you wrote your novel in just a couple of weeks, people will assume that it was a rushed job. Tell them that you took seven years and they will ask: "So, do you think it's your masterpiece?" Even if you say that it got done in a year, someone will inevitably ask if that was really enough time for a seriously considered novel.
A long silence between novels gets people posing even more discommodious questions: "Were you blocked? Did you think that everything you wrote between then and now was utter shit?" As such, the shazam ... at last! arrival of the new book freights it with the weight of high expectations "years in the making", and all that.
Back in the 1980s, Bernard MacLaverty made his name with two brilliant novels --Lamb and Cal--both set amid the maelstrom that was Northern Ireland. But to call the Belfast-born MacLaverty a writer defined by the Troubles is to do him a disservice. Though the shadow of sectarianism was everywhere in these two books (and his two subsequent superbly crafted novels, Grace Notes and The Anatomy School), it always struck me that his true subject was the loneliness at the heart of the human condition; the barriers--personal, political, spiritual--that impede us from essential connections with others.
MacLaverty's last novel was published in 2001 (though there have been collections of short stories in the meantime). Now, at last, arrives Midwinter Break. True to his uncompromising fictional vision, he hasn't returned after 16 years with some massive Northern Irish Bildungsroman. Rather, this deceptively low-key, unsettling novel is a portrait of what is perhaps the most difficult of alliances and affinities to sustain: a long marriage.
Gerry and Stella sense that, on a certain level, they are beyond their sell-by date. Both are retired; both are at a loose existential end. Born in Northern Ireland, their initial courtship was played out during the Troubles. Eventually, they voted with their feet, heading to Scotland, where they live in one of those high-ceiling tenement flats that are a testament to Glaswegian bourgeois bohemianism.

Not that they are ageing hipsters. Gerry, once an architect, is someone who now knows that his was a small career. Stella is mourning the absence of their son, who has emigrated to Canada, as well as the spiritual emptiness of the day. Though long resident on the so-called mainland, they are still deeply Northern Irish--and, in the case of Stella, pious.
A midwinter break in Amsterdam has been arranged. They are not looking upon this sojourn as an opportunity to resuscitate their marriage, to renew vows, or any such nonsense. Rather, it is seen as a break from the quotidian realities of their shared life together. But one of the great truths of travel is that along with your suitcase you bring all of your domestic and internal baggage with you. Gerry dampens down his melancholy with a non-stop cascade of alcohol. Stella is edging deeper into a personal crisis. She is in negotiation with herself to leave Gerry and perhaps enter a religious order.
This is a novel shrewdly devoid of grand drama (a fall in a hotel shower notwithstanding). Rather, 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; Stella's need for artificial tears to lubricate her eyes; Gerry's need to have a whisky bottle to hand at almost every waking moment; the purchase (by Gerry, for Stella) of a requested pack of Werther's Original--which he then initially tells her he's forgotten as a strange tease. And he captures superbly the unspoken nuances underscoring marital banter, the silent spaces that hover above decades of conjugality.
Gerry and Stella eat the hotel buffet breakfast, pay visits to museums, do time in an Amsterdam Irish pub, make love, spend time alone and privately contemplate the unsettled state of the landscape between them. Gerry holds on to a Northern Irish nightmare memory that now silhouettes the ever-encroaching inevitability of life running out of road.
Midwinter Break poses so many crucial questions about the ties that bind and the secret rooms in which we all live, to which even those closest to us are never privy. The mystery of the person in bed with you for many decades is one of the key ruminations haunting this profoundly affecting novel. But it is MacLaverty's remarkable skill as a writer to supersede it with an even more daunting query: can we ever truly know ourselves?
Douglas Kennedy's books include "The Blue Hour" (Atria)
Caption: No retreat: an ageing married couple travel to Amsterdam in MacLaverty's first novel since 2001
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kennedy, Douglas. "Scenes from a marriage." New Statesman, 18 Aug. 2017, p. 49. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A504340535/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=72bd5352. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A504340535

Midwinter Break

264.26 (June 26, 2017): p150.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* Midwinter Break
Bernard MacLaverty. Norton, $24.95 (208p) ISBN 978-0-393-60962-2

The fifth novel from Booker finalist MacLaverty is a quietly powerful elegy that chides two finely-wrought characters for not being capable of defining what they value most in life. Gerry and Stella, in a possibly final stage of their married life--a life that included a near-tragic brush with the Troubles back in their native Northern Ireland--take a winter trip from their home in Scotland to Amsterdam, a journey that starts as a holiday but ends a crucible. In the cold and gloom, amid puzzling ennui that has gripped Stella, Gerry, an architect and alcoholic, is a keen, if cynical, observer of a world he finds bemusing but less larded with burdensome meaning than does Stella. With a kind of existential humor he teases his wife about her religious fervor. Stella, meanwhile, is dead serious about her Catholicism, and she has secretly planned the holiday as a first step toward leaving Gerry. She has heard of a group of lay nuns who reside in Amsterdam, and she steals away one morning to pay a visit, thinking she might ask to join them. Stella is the alpha partner in this eroded relationship, but it is Gerry's thoughts, about everything, upon which we rely for wisdom. Because the reader knows what Stella intends before Gerry does, his every observation is shot through with melancholy; his simple declaration of devotion on this graceful novel's final page is exquisite. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Midwinter Break." Publishers Weekly, 26 June 2017, p. 150. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497444218/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=42966dec. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A497444218

MacLaverty, Bernard: MIDWINTER BREAK

(June 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
MacLaverty, Bernard MIDWINTER BREAK Norton (Adult Fiction) $24.95 8, 22 ISBN: 978-0-393-60962-2
The Belfast-born writer etches an affecting portrait of a couple more than 40 years married as they confront the idea that one of them is thinking of leaving.Stella is a retired English teacher who likes to do cryptic crosswords as mental exercise. Her husband, Gerry, is a retired architect who likes to drink. They grew up and met in Northern Ireland but now live in Scotland, apparently exiled by the violence of the "thirty years war," a time 74-year-old MacLaverty (Collected Stories, 2014, etc.) wrote of in Cal and elsewhere. That all is not well with the marriage may first be gleaned from their taking a January holiday in Amsterdam--an odd time and place to seek a break from the Glasgow winter. The signs and sounds of friction emerge as the two characters exhibit and silently or orally comment on the routines, tics, and habits fostered by four decades of marriage, an accretion that, like coral, can offer both protection and sharp edges. Deploying a masterful palette of details and allusions, MacLaverty reveals that Stella is on a mission that involves a Dutch Beguinage--a women's religious community--an old vow, her Catholic faith, and three scars: one from a C-section and two puckered circles on the front and back of her torso that are long left unexplained. Gerry's boozing, so sadly and desperately on display in these few days, and his often acerbic jabs at Catholicism--a seeming relic of the Troubles--buttress her resolve, but they aren't apparently decisive. MacLaverty makes the reader share some of the regret in the prospect of a sudden sundering by giving the couple a keen, humorous, mutually delightful banter that comes only with years of wit and happy practice. A closely observed, deeply sympathetic rendering of a relationship and the fissures that threaten to wreck it.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"MacLaverty, Bernard: MIDWINTER BREAK." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495427772/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=470f914d. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A495427772

Book World: Exploring the mystery of a marriage long challenged by traumatic events

Jon Michaud
(Aug. 24, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Byline: Jon Michaud
Midwinter Break
By Bernard MacLaverty
W.W. Norton. 243 pp. $24.95
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Meet Stella and Gerry Gilmore, the couple at the center of Bernard MacLaverty's new novel, "Midwinter Break." Originally from the north of Ireland, they have lived much of their adult lives in Scotland. They are empty-nesters. Their only child, Michael, has moved to Canada and started his own family. Michael's absence - along with the traumatic events that accompanied his birth - have cast a shadow over the Gilmores' marriage, a shadow they have never fully reckoned with. During the course of this sure-handed and captivating novel, they will finally be forced to do so.
Stella is a retired teacher and practicing Catholic who is searching for a way of living "a more devout life." With her remaining years, she wants to "make a contribution, however small" to the world. The problem is that she's not sure whether Gerry will be a part of this final act. A former architect and university professor, Gerry drinks too much and is given to making punning quips as a means of remaining emotionally disengaged from his life.
Gerry also mocks her faith, especially when he is inebriated. She has booked a long weekend in Amsterdam for them, in part, to decide whether there is a viable life for her outside of their marriage. Ostensibly a romantic getaway, the trip is actually an opportunity for Stella to visit the Begijnhof, one of the oldest enclosed courtyards in Amsterdam, which was once home to the Beguines, "a Catholic sisterhood who lived alone as nuns, but without vows." Stella has aspirations of taking up residence there, but she learns that it's not so simple. She can't just leave Gerry and move into a life of piety and good works in one of the most desirable spots in Amsterdam.
MacLaverty's novel is relatively short (240 pages), but it feels like a more expansive work because of its unhurried pace and careful attention to each moment of the Gilmores' sojourn. (If you can, read it in real time, over three or four days, to give yourself a midsummer break from your own routine.) We accompany this couple not only to the Anne Frank House and the Rijksmuseum, but also into their deepest selves. It is an intimate book that makes wonderful use of the close third person. Here's a passage in which Stella, remembering the early days of their courtship, conflates the stones from a beach with the illusions of falling in love:
"She was always on the lookout for stones. Only white perfect ones would make her stoop. ... When they were wet and glistening they seemed special but she knew that when they dried out maybe some yellow or grey would creep into their colour. The perfect ones would end up in a glass bowl on her table. It was their simplicity she found so attractive."
A restrained simplicity is also the stylistic hallmark of this novel. MacLaverty's only missteps are his occasionally clumsy and largely unnecessary segues into flashbacks. The reader doesn't need the hand-holding to jump into the past that still haunts Gerry and Stella. Those events, parceled out slowly in the narrative, are tied to the "Troubles" of the late 20th century: the murders and bombings that made daily life in Belfast and elsewhere in Northern Ireland so frightening.
This is familiar terrain for MacLaverty, whose 1983 novel "Cal" told the story of a terrorist accomplice who falls in love with a victim's wife. A violent encounter is what prompts Gerry and Stella to move to Scotland; it is also one of the sources of their marital difficulties. Gerry's drinking and Stella's desire to live a life of faith are their respective means of coping with these experiences. MacLaverty manages to dramatize this without reducing his protagonists to mere casualties.
A carefully assembled structure of symbols and allusions gives "Midwinter Break" resonance and depth. The Netherlands was the birthplace of King William III (aka William of Orange), who deposed the Catholic King James II in the Glorious Revolution. The novel's title refers to Christina Rossetti's poem "In the Bleak Midwinter," which imagines the nativity in a snowy northern landscape. And the snow that falls late in the book calls to mind James Joyce's "The Dead," in which a husband discovers a passionate secret his wife has kept from him.
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.
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Michaud is a novelist and the head librarian at the Center for Fiction.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Michaud, Jon. "Book World: Exploring the mystery of a marriage long challenged by traumatic events." Washington Post, 24 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501626572/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e48b0a3c. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A501626572

McKanic, Arlene. "Midwinter Break." BookPage, Sept. 2017, p. 18. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502517412/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2c1a571f. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017. Levine, Mark. "Midwinter Break." Booklist, 1 July 2017, p. 22. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499862696/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ad93321d. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017. Kennedy, Douglas. "Scenes from a marriage." New Statesman, 18 Aug. 2017, p. 49. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A504340535/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=72bd5352. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017. "Midwinter Break." Publishers Weekly, 26 June 2017, p. 150. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497444218/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=42966dec. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017. "MacLaverty, Bernard: MIDWINTER BREAK." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495427772/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=470f914d. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017. Michaud, Jon. "Book World: Exploring the mystery of a marriage long challenged by traumatic events." Washington Post, 24 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501626572/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e48b0a3c. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.

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