read an extract

Lamb - the screenplay

Just once in a while there comes a novel so moving yet simple that you put it down at the end feeling emotionally shattered. That was my reaction to Lamb, a brilliant first novel by Bernard MacLaverty.
The Daily Express (5 June 1980)

In its compressed power, compassion and culminating hopelessness... Lamb recalls the early James Hanley, a comparison intended as the highest praise... the coda on a Donegal beach touches springs of feeling accessible only to a born writer with a manifest destiny.
Christopher Wordsworth in The Guardian (5 June 1980)

This powerful novella is a wrenching experience of love lost and so might also be considered a parable of the country in which it is set: Ireland... a beautiful, poignant story... a startling memorable end.
Publishers Weekly (18 July 1980)

The reader is drawn into an emotional affinity rarely achieved by serious writing in our time... This is an impressive book.
Julia O'Faolain in The New York Times Book Review (2nd November 1980)

Lamb will move you by the grace of its prose and by its honesty and emotional accuracy. It is not easy to write about innocence in a world like ours but Bernard MacLaverty has done it. This is a beautiful novel.
John Gabree in Newsday Long Island, New York

If there is such a genre as the first novel then Lamb is the finest example of it for decades.
Alan Bold in The Sunday Standard (2nd May 82)