Simple humanity, eloquently caught....Though <i>Cal</i> 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 <i>Cal</i> 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,