Midwinter Break

Reviews / Votes

"Sure-handed and captivating." -- The Washington Post "Utterly gripping.... This is a quietly brilliant novel, which makes for essential reading." -- Guardian "[A] tender, affecting novel.... MacLaverty's gorgeous prose is tactile and understated... and the poignancy of his story fills the reader with yearning." -- Minneapolis Star Tribune "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 "[Midwinter Break] is, pretty much, a perfect piece of work. It is paced flawlessly, is lapidary of structure, and is delivered with a purpose and clarity and control that can shut out the noise of the world, of your own heartbeat, even: one of those precious books that, when at last you look up from its pages, you need a moment of re-adjustment, of decompression, so immersive is it.... It is breathtaking writing." -- Spectator "Midwinter Break is a touching, hopeful portrait of love's complexity, written by a master craftsman, from the fullness of his heart." -- Irish Times "MacLaverty doesn't publish novels very often, but when he does they are outstanding." -- Sunday Times "An exceptionally good book, beautifully and intelligently written, well worth waiting for.... [MacLaverty] writes with an unfailing and generous sympathy.... Everything rings true." -- Scotsman "A quietly powerful elegy that chides two finely wrought characters for not being capable of defining what they value most in life.... Exquisite." -- Publishers Weekly "A closely observed, deeply sympathetic rendering of a relationship and the fissures that threaten to wreck it." -- Kirkus Reviews