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by Bernard MacLaverty (Author)
This long-awaited new collection from the noted Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty examines worlds in collision, relationships fragmenting, innocence coming face to face with real life and real death. A Catholic schoolboy playing football has a theological debate with a Protestant policeman; a chess game in Spain is a catalyst for grief and redemption; in the haunting title story a Belfast man out walking his dog is kidnapped at gunpoint.
As always, MacLaverty's writing is vivid, exact, and pellucid, his characters perfectly observed, the surface of the prose deceptively still. It is only after we enter the world of the stories that we begin to make out the huge shapes that move there: loss, love, disappointment, fierce joy. This is a powerful, honest, and moving book by one of the great storytellers of our age.
Back Jacket
'These are stories which powerfully address an important theme: the poignance and fragility of private lives in the shadow of public events. They mark out the balance and imbalance--the joy and defeat, the darkness of cruelty against the sweet ordinariness of life--in vivid and witty writing which never loses its compassion.' - Eavan Boland, author of In a Time of Violence
