Cal

Set in the Northern Ireland of the 1980s, Cal tells the story of a young Catholic man living in a Protestant area.

Simple humanity, eloquently caught....Though Cal is a bleak novel, there is a flicker of lyricism running through it, like the sun shining through the shattered windows of a ruined church

To fashion a short, telling novel out of the hideous complexities of Northern Ireland takes narrative skill of a high order. In Cal Bernard MacLaverty has managed to do it superbly

It performs the remarkable feat of compressing into its short span both a doomed love affair and an account of the impossibility of living, in the circumstances of that doomed province, without redemption and without punishment… MacLaverty has a true feeling for tragedy’

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 Gáis Energy Irish Novel of the Year. He has written versions of his fiction for other media - radio and television plays, screenplays and libretti.