Collected Short Stories

‘His tact and pacing, in the individual sentence and the overall story, are beautiful: in his best work, the elegiac is bodied forth in perfectly pondered images and rhythms ... McLaverty’s place in our literature is secure.’

Seamus Heaney


Michael McLaverty, one of Ireland’s most distinguished short story writers, painted with acute precision and intensity the northern landscapes of his homeland – lonely hill farms, rough island terrain and the tight back streets of Belfast. Focusing on moments of passion, wonder or bitter disenchantment in lives that are a continuous struggle towards the light, these stories, in the compassion of the tone and the spare purity of the language, are nothing short of masterly.

With an introduction by Seamus Heaney and an afterword by Sophia Hillan, this edition is a fitting celebration of a writer who has been compared to both Joyce and Chekhov.