Secrets and Other Stories

Married love, male friendship, a small boy intruding upon secret adult grief, a husband contemplating infidelity - Bernard MacLaverty catches his characters at moments of epiphany, when ordinary life is set alight with sudden knowledge, memory, regret or desire.

“His aunt had been small - her head on a level with his when she sat at her table - and she seemed to get smaller each year. Her skin fresh, her hair white and waved and always well washed. She wore no jewelry except a cameo ring on the third finger of her right hand and, around her neck, a gold locket on a chain. The white classical profile on the ring was almost worn through and had become translucent and indistinct. ... The boy had noticed the ring when she had read to him as a child. In the beginning fairy tales, then as he got older extracts from famous novels, Lorna Doone, Persuasion, Wuthering Heights and her favourite extract, because she read it so often, Pip’s meeting with Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. She would sit with him on her knee, her arms around him and holding the page flat with her hand. When he was bored he would interrupt her and ask her about the ring. He loved hearing her tell of how her grandmother had given it to her as a brooch and she had had a ring made from it. He would try to count back to see how old it was. Had her grandmother got it from her grandmother? And if so what had she turned it into? She would nod her head from side to side and say, ‘How would I know a thing like that?’ keeping her place in the closed book with her finger.

‘Don’t be so inquisitive,’ she’d say.‘Let’s see what happens next in the story.’”

Copyright © Bernard MacLaverty. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge and White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN

This collection contains:
The Exercise
A Rat and some Renovations
St Paul Could Hit the Nail on the Head
A Happy Birthday
Secrets
The Miraculous Candidate
Between Two Shores
Umberto Verdi, Chimney Sweep
Where the Tides Meet
Hugo
A Pornographer Woos
A Present for Christmas
Anodyne
The Bull with the Hard Hat
The Deep End

The short stories in this collection relate to the stories of the ordinary people that lived in Northern Ireland throughout the Troubles. The stories are a mixture of humor, sadness and occasionally pain.