Lucy Caldwell, winner of the EM Foster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and the BBC National Short Story Award winner, in her latest novel Devotions which focuses on the point of live itself – via various unmoored protagonists, from a young widow facing up to the essential hopelessness of existence in “Hamlet, a Love Story” to a forty-something, divorced dad who is clearing his dead mother’s home in “All Grown UP”. 

A young Belfast theatre troupe brings their experimental production of Hamlet to New York. Harmony Hill is about a professional violinist flying back to Dublin 

on a night-flight, travelling with a violin older than the United States, a professional musician slips through time. A man who loses all he thought he had, and finds himself haunted by all he never will, comes to a painful new understanding of what it might mean to love.  Transporting and profound, these are stories of live, grief, longing of new beginnings, and the ways we find shelter in each other.

Caldwell likes to call her creations (“of words and rhythms in a precise order for the purpose of conjuring something up” as she has said).

In “Little Lands”, one and a quarter minutes that Captain von Trapp and Maria dance together in The Sound of Music, but is really about life and loss and romantic versus spiritual love, with mother watching it with her seven-year-old daughter.

The narrator says “You have to look for your life, the film says – Maria says, quoting the Reverend Mother” .

Luke MacNamara in “All Grown Up”, who seeks consolation from the emerging constellations as he lies on his back on the grass. “No wonder he thinks, we have always needed to invent other explanations, to imagine them- to believe that things are written in the stars”.

In Devotions an unnamed mother of two lies in bed on a December morning watching a livestream of the winter solstice sunrise at Newgrange, in Ireland’s Boyne Valley.  With a sense of spiritual quest as she waits for dawn to rise over and in the ancient burial chamber, prompting some introspection. “There’s a melancholy, you’ve started to think, to the summer solstice-something steely about it, implacable- that was never there when you were younger,” ponders the second person narrator. “Maybe the test now is to find happiness in the darkness- the dark part of the year, the metaphorical dark of your life’s forest”. 

Devotions: Eight Stories by Lucy Caldwell, Faber £14.99, 208 pages.

Understanding of what it might mean to love. 

Lucy Caldwell, winner of the EM Foster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and the BBC National Short Story Award winner, in her latest novel Devotions which focuses on the point of live itself – via various unmoored protagonists, from a young widow facing up to the essential hopelessness of existence in “Hamlet, a Love Story” to a forty-something, divorced dad who is clearing his dead mother’s home in “All Grown UP”. 

A young Belfast theatre troupe brings their experimental production of Hamlet to New York. Harmony Hill is about a professional violinist flying back to Dublin 

on a night-flight, travelling with a violin older than the United States, a professional musician slips through time. A man who loses all he thought he had, and finds himself haunted by all he never will, comes to a painful new understanding of what it might mean to love.  Transporting and profound, these are stories of live, grief, longing of new beginnings, and the ways we find shelter in each other.

Caldwell likes to call her creations (“of words and rhythms in a precise order for the purpose of conjuring something up” as she has said).

In “Little Lands”, one and a quarter minutes that Captain von Trapp and Maria dance together in The Sound of Music, but is really about life and loss and romantic versus spiritual love, with mother watching it with her seven-year-old daughter.

The narrator says “You have to look for your life, the film says – Maria says, quoting the Reverend Mother” .

Luke MacNamara in “All Grown Up”, who seeks consolation from the emerging constellations as he lies on his back on the grass. “No wonder he thinks, we have always needed to invent other explanations, to imagine them- to believe that things are written in the stars”.

In Devotions an unnamed mother of two lies in bed on a December morning watching a livestream of the winter solstice sunrise at Newgrange, in Ireland’s Boyne Valley.  With a sense of spiritual quest as she waits for dawn to rise over and in the ancient burial chamber, prompting some introspection. “There’s a melancholy, you’ve started to think, to the summer solstice-something steely about it, implacable- that was never there when you were younger,” ponders the second person narrator. “Maybe the test now is to find happiness in the darkness- the dark part of the year, the metaphorical dark of your life’s forest”. 

Devotions: Eight Stories by Lucy Caldwell, Faber £14.99, 208 pages.