Book description
The long-awaited new collection from Bernard MacLaverty examines
worlds in collision, relationships fragmenting, innocence face to face
with real life, real death. A Catholic schoolboy minding goal has a
theological debate with a B-Special; a chess game in Spain is a
catalyst for grief and redemption; a Belfast man out walking his dog
is kidnapped at gunpoint and told to say his ABC. . .
Interwoven through the book are wry, elliptical 'stories within
stories' about fiction and the writing of it, featuring 'your man' -a
comically beleaguered alter ego. Acting as foils to the brilliance of
the real thing, these very short pieces point up the tough lyricism of
MacLaverty's work. As always, his writing is vivid, exact and
pellucid, his characters perfectly observed, the surface of the prose
deceptively still. It is only once we enter the world of the stories
that we begin to make out the huge shapes that move there: loss, love,
disappointment, fierce joy.
WALKING THE DOG has been worth waiting for: it is a powerful, honest
and moving book by one of the great storytellers of our age.
Bernard MacLaverty lives in Glasgow. He has written four collections
of stories and four novels, including
Grace Notes
which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Saltire Scottish
Book of the Year Award. His most recent story collection,
Matters of
Life and Death
, was published in 2006. He has written versions of his fiction for
other media - radio plays, television plays, screenplays - and wrote and
directed the short film
Bye Child
which recently won a BAFTA award.
