But he also conjures pathos from tiny details - a towel, 'laundered so many times the nap on it had almost disappeared' - and from his many comical priests. MacLaverty's two greatest strengths, then, are his capacity for introspection and his dialogue.

MacLaverty, the poet of awkwardness, is also the master of polite hostility, always attendant to little conversational agonies and non sequiturs: 'I don't know about the rest of you,' grins Mary Lawless at one point, 'but some of the happiest moments of my life have been spent doing jigsaw puzzles.' Martin's mishaps and adventures with his two schoolfriends, Kavanagh and Foley, find their counterpoint in Martin's mother's tight-lipped suppers for her friends Mary Lawless, Nurse Gilliland and the local priest, Father Farquharson. But there were terrible responsibilities as well. Maybe a big fry with bacon and eggs and potato bread. Have a good comfortable house with big rooms and all the facilities. 'It would be a beautiful thing to be a priest - give yourself to Christ for the rest of your life. And he speaks, once again, with the tormented voice of the typical MacLaverty adolescent: confused by religion and fascinated by sex, prey to huge appetites and desires. Martin is a real MacLaverty boy, both self-absorbed and oversolicitous, the type who'll raise his hand in class to answer a question 'even if he hadn't a baldy notion', just to relieve the silence. Here, MacLaverty's wondering lost young man is Martin Brennan, a teenager at a Catholic school in Belfast in the 1960s. But the novel, with its great expanses, provides him with the perspective to survey vast wastelands of emotion. It has been argued that the short story is the true medium for MacLaverty's peculiar skills. MacLaverty continually evokes what Emerson called a 'silent melancholy' - that sense of enormous emptiness that seems to loom largest between the ages of, say, 15 and 21. With the notable exception of Catherine McKenna, the composer of the much-acclaimed Grace Notes, MacLaverty's characters tend to be young, sensitive, intelligent males, whose personal tragedy it is to be young, sensitive, intelligent, male, and living in the north of Ireland.

The typical MacLaverty plot is a three-strand cord: loss and hope and disappointment. There is a sense throughout, in both the novels and stories, that civilisation hangs by a thread, or a twisted skein. The novels are set mostly and often wholly in the north of Ireland, a region - if one might be permitted to say so - of apparently irreducible unhappiness. There are four - Lamb, Cal, Grace Notes and now The Anatomy School - as well as four books of short stories. It is possible to read the complete novels of Bernard MacLaverty in a weekend.

Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty