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Cal
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  • Published: 6 February 1998
  • ISBN: 9780099767114
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $29.99

Cal

Formats & editions
Paperback
6 Feb 1998
EBook
1 Mar 2011
Audiobook
2 June 2011
Paperback
7 May 2019
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A haunting love story set against the grim backdrop of fear and violence in Northern Ireland.

Set in the Northern Ireland of the 1980’s, Cal tells the story of a young Catholic man living in a Protestant area. For Cal, some choices are devastatingly simple: he can work in an abattoir that nauseates him or join the dole queue; he can brood on his past or plan a future with Marcella.

Springing out of the fear and violence of Ulster, Cal is a haunting love story that unfolds in a land where tenderness and innocence can only flicker briefly in the dark.
  • Published: 6 February 1998
  • ISBN: 9780099767114
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $29.99
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About the author

Bernard MacLaverty

Bernard MacLaverty lives in Glasgow. He has written five collections of stories and four other novels, including Grace Notes which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award. He has written versions of his fiction for other media – radio and television plays, screenplays and libretti.

portrait photo of Bernard MacLaverty

Also by Bernard MacLaverty

Blank Pages and Other Stories
Midwinter Break
Collected Stories
Matters Of Life & Death
The Anatomy School
Lamb
Walking the Dog and Other Stories
See all

Praise for Cal

Simple humanity, eloquently caught....Though Cal is a bleak novel, there is a flicker of lyricism running through it, like the sun shining through the shattered windows of a ruined church

New York Times

To fashion a short, telling novel out of the hideous complexities of Northern Ireland takes narrative skill of a high order. In Cal Bernard MacLaverty has managed to do it superbly

Nina Bawden

It performs the remarkable feat of compressing into its short span both a doomed love affair and an account of the impossibility of living, in the circumstances of that doomed province, without redemption and without punishment… MacLaverty has a true feeling for tragedy’

Anita Brookner