I’m glad that Bernard MacLaverty’s new stories appear so infrequently. Glad because they unfailingly show the time and care he devotes to them. Glad because the enjoyment they give is so intense that it’s best rationed and savored. It’s a pleasure tinged with melancholy, like the enjoyment of an autumn day when you feel suddenly an intimation of winter ahead. Only the best storytellers can pull it off; the sweetness of life infected yet intensified by loss. John McGahern, Colm Toibin, William Trevor, even James Joyce can do it. So can MacLaverty.

The twelve pieces in Blank Pages and Other Stories all seem to me to be, to some degree, reflections on aging and on the delicate and sometimes painful adjustments to relationships that come with it. A man loses his grandchildren on a day trip to the botanical gardens. Another makes a visit to his frail and declining mother in a far-off nursing home. A widow grieves for a son lost at sea. The settings may change, but not MacLaverty’s approach – the precise uncovering of the layers in a human life to expose the things that are common for all of us but unique to each of us. That’s his brilliance. Each of us lives through and endures in unique ways experiences that are known to every one of us.

There isn’t a mediocre story in this collection and there are at least two masterpieces. Sounds and Sweet Airs, apparently so simple and effortless, is a brilliant and poignant telling of a simple encounter between the old and the young. The End of Days, set during the pandemic of 1918, has Egon Schiele witnessing the death of his pregnant wife from Spanish influenza. Each captures an entire world in a few pages.

None other than Hilary Mantel once asked “Why is Bernard MacLaverty not celebrated as one of the wonders of the world?”. Well, he is by me, but the truthful answer is the world seems to show little appetite for the un-showy yet masterful art, crammed with nuance and subtlety, to which he has dedicated his writing life.