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Product Description
Product Description
Cal has very few choices in life. He can continue working at the abattoir that sickens him, or join the ranks of the unemployed. He can brood on his past or try to plan a future with Marcella. Cal is a haunting love story set against the fear and violence of Ulster, where tenderness and innocence must struggle to survive.
About the Author
Bernard MacLaverty was born in Belfast in 1942, and moved to Scotland in 1975. He is the author of the novels Lamb (1980); Cal (1983); Grace Notes (1997); and The Anatomy School (2001), set in Belfast in the late 1960s. Both Lamb and Cal have been made into major films for which he wrote the screenplays, and he has written various versions of his fiction for radio, television and screen. Grace Notes was awarded the 1997 Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award and shortlisted for many other major prizes, including the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread Novel Award. His books of short stories are Secrets & Other Stories (1977); A Time to Dance & Other Stories (1982); The Great Profundo & Other Stories (1987); Walking the Dog & Other Stories (1994), and most recently, Matters of Life & Death (2006).
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First Sentence
He stood at the back gateway of the abattoir, his hands thrust into his pockets, his stomach rigid with the ache of want. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
He stood at the back gateway of the abattoir, his hands thrust into his pockets, his stomach rigid with the ache of want. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is just the most amazing book.
I suspect like many others I was jaundiced at reading/hearing so much about the troubles in Northern Ireland while they were at their worst and I thought I couldn't read anything new about them. I suspect my feelings were mostly because of frustration that I was impotent to do anything about the problems as the politicians also seemed to be at the time. I didn't think that any book which covers the subject could be so totally absorbing. This book cleverly shows that people living in Northern Ireland probably didn't have choices. They pretty well had to go along with one side or the other. Sitting on the fence would have been a very dangerous place to be.
Bernard McLafferty has written a tour de force in this book in so many ways. It's an extraordinarly gripping read telling the story of a lad who didn't want to get sucked in. Poignant. This was required reading for a course and I am so glad it was.
I suspect like many others I was jaundiced at reading/hearing so much about the troubles in Northern Ireland while they were at their worst and I thought I couldn't read anything new about them. I suspect my feelings were mostly because of frustration that I was impotent to do anything about the problems as the politicians also seemed to be at the time. I didn't think that any book which covers the subject could be so totally absorbing. This book cleverly shows that people living in Northern Ireland probably didn't have choices. They pretty well had to go along with one side or the other. Sitting on the fence would have been a very dangerous place to be.
Bernard McLafferty has written a tour de force in this book in so many ways. It's an extraordinarly gripping read telling the story of a lad who didn't want to get sucked in. Poignant. This was required reading for a course and I am so glad it was.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Set in war-torn Northern Ireland in a hard-pressed Protestant ditrict, MacLaverty's Cal mixes the somehow predictable love affair between representatives of the two opposing sides with the tragedy of the political situation. Admittedly, some simplification in the line of the plot may well put off the trained reader; still the author succeeds in keeping outward tension going, while building up acceptably to the inevitability of making the best of both worlds.
This short novel, draws from the author's personal background and reads the more authentic for that. If anything, Cal can claim its righteous place alongside those other works which deal with ideological prejudice as the root cause of an unbridgeable social and emotional gap between characters: 'East is east and wet is west and ne'er the twain shall meet', or things to that effect.
In hindsight, this is a most satisfactory read, and an early promise of such top quality successors as Grace Notes and more.
4 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
When I found out this was the book we had to read for English class, I did not like it at all. To be honest, I find the entire problem going on in Ireland a bit uninteresting. Because that's what this book's about in the whole. When I first started to read, my opinion didn't change either. But later on, when I really got to know the main character, Cal, it's a very interesting book. I could hardly stop reading, and when I had to I was already longing to read on. The problems Cal faces are in a way recognisable, but yet they aren't since he's living in a violent environment. You can really feel his doubt; should he choose his side, the Catholic side, or the other, the "Brit" side? And then there's Marcella, the mysterious woman he fell in love with. An impossible love as it seems later on.
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