Michael McLaverty is an Irish regional novelist who writes almost exclusively about Ulster Catholics. His eight novels, published between 1939 and 1965, are set mainly in Belfast, Rathlin Island, Toome, and on Strangford Lough. For the most part, McLaverty avoids political or sectarian strife in his works; he seeks instead to depict the essentials of the private and social lives of Ulster men and women in the landscapes of eastern Ulster. Although McLaverty's short stories are widely known, especially through anthologies, his novels have had a limited, though steady, readership and have received little critical study. Ulster poet Seamus Heaney pointed to McLaverty's characteristics as a novelist in two recent tributes. In a brief introduction to McLaverty's Collected Short Stories (1978), Heaney commends McLaverty for his "fidelity to the intimate and the local," and "his love for the universal, the worn grain of unspectacular experience, the well-turned grain of language itself...