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. 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.
"A master of fine detail" (Anne Enright), MacLaverty captures the joys and sorrows of everyday existence with "extraordinary emotional precision" (Colm Tóibín). Blank Pages elegantly probes MacLaverty's signature themes-domestic love, Catholicism, the Troubles, aging-with compassion and insight, reminding us again why he is regarded as one of the greatest living Irish writers.