Midwinter Break

Longlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize 2018 Waterstones Fiction Book of the Month for January 2018 “This is not a story about old people,” Bernard MacLaverty told the Guardian. “It’s the story of two young people who got old and they have fallen out of step.” After a hiatus of some sixteen years, the author of Cal and Grace Notes returns with a masterful dissection of a long life both shared and divided, a marriage where one party is happy with their lot and the other is yearning for something rather more. In their past trots the stalking horse of an Ireland and the Troubles both Gerry and Stella have long turned their back on. In their present, a long weekend in Amsterdam proves catalyst to a brilliant study of monogamy and the slow damage of compromise. Born in Belfast, Bernard MacLaverty is a novelist and short-story writer who has also written radio and television plays, libretti and screenplays, most notably adapting his own novels Cal and Lamb for film. His publications include the novel Grace Notes, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and his Collected Stories.