An intense exploration of love and uncertainty when a long-married couple take a midwinter break in Amsterdam.
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 Gais Energy Irish Novel of the Year. He has written versions of his fiction for other media - radio and television plays, screenplays and libretti.
Its portrayal of the tightening vice of alcohol addiction is
unparalleled. But its profound exploration of its love,
companionship, faith, work and our search for meaning in life made
it a tender masterpiece, and one of the year’s essential reads.
*Guardian, **Books of the Year***
MacLaverty doesn’t publish novels very often but when he does they
are outstanding.
*Sunday Times, **Books of the Year***
A gem of a novel.
*Herald Scotland, **Books of the Year***
Alive with utterly convincing actuality, this affecting, funny and
acute book is a triumph of quiet masterliness.
*Herald Scotland, **Books of the Year***
It's an immersive and astonishing book.
*Herald Scotland, **Books of the Year***
[An] intense, emotionally vivid portrait of an elderly couple’s
relationship in crisis.
*The Times, **Books of the Year***
A marriage under strain after 40 years? A mini-break marred by
bitter cold weather? An escapist dream that’s about to be nixed by
reality? Gloomy though it sounds, this warm, intimate portrait of
ageing love is one of the wittiest, wisest novels of the year.
*Mail on Sunday, **Books of the Year***
Midwinter Break is a work of extraordinary emotional precision and
sympathy, about coming to terms - to an honest reckoning - with
love and the loss of love, with memory and pain. Full of scenes
that are rendered with exquisite accuracy and care, allowing the
most detailed physical descriptions to be placed against the
possibility of a rich spiritual life, this is a novel of great
ambition by an artist at the height of his powers.
*Colm Tóibín*
A quiet, brilliantly written novel that packs a tremendous
punch.
*Penelope Lively*
An artist with a subtle feel for the ordinary, MacLaverty’s wry,
outstanding novel about the tests that time, age and life impose on
love resonates with humanity and emotional intelligence.
*Financial Times*
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