The real theme is fading creativity and the search for inspiration...A deep and highly complex drama of the psyche

This complex fin-de-siecle masterpiece...seems eerily to pre-echo the destructive decadence that would shortly shatter European civilisation itself

Thomas Mann's story of obsession and spiritual malaise

What Mann understands and laughs at, though it grips him, is the quasi-sexual attraction of beauty and philosophy...Death in Venice is one of the undisputed classics of contemporary European literature

Mann's obsessive story explores the complex, haunted relationship between an ageing writer and a beautiful Polish boy

This most enticing of writers is also one of the most penetrating

His insights into the female mind are unique

A masterly control of pace and structure, pitch-perfect capturing of voice, characterisation that has spot on credibility, human pleasure in life's satisfactions shadowed by awareness of the ways in which they can be jeopardised

MacLaverty has never written more powerfully or with greater authorial grip

This is a fine collection of short stories, sometimes brutal and shocking, but written with a sort of underground tenderness

MacLaverty's stories don't lack drama, but their effect is subtle and stealthy: they creep up on you

A master at work...richly textured, filled with vividly humorous detail

Confirms MacLaverty's status as an impressive heir of Chekhov and James Joyce