'She belongs with O'Connor, O'Faolain, William Sansom and Graham Greene.' - William Trevor
On an island teeming with masters of the short story, Mary Lavin's distinct voice and devoted following set her apart. Before her death in 1996, this Irish writer had received many honors and prizes not only for her luminous short stories but also for several highly regarded novels. William Trevor praised Lavin's ability to "make moments timeless, to illuminate people and places, words and things, by touching them with the magic of the rarely-gifted storyteller."
Eleven of Mary Lavin's short stories, originally selected for a 1964 collection in 2 volumes by Constable, with this Penguin edition arriving in 1981 when she was asked to choose just enough for one volume. She said she wanted to make the choice as representative as possible of her entire body of work, but knew this would be difficult. So she took one story from each of the eleven volumes of stories already published, and to simplify the choice further, she selected the title story in each case. One snag was that her first book of stories did not have a title story, so one of the storties was chosen at random. In the Middle of the Fields is one of her most highly regarded stories, and it is here, and the others include Lilacs, The Long Ago, A Likely Story, Happiness, and The Shrine.
'I envy the skill of Mary Lavin... Her style is bare and direct, her dialogue artfully flat. But in her capacity to make much out of little, to compress an entire ethos into an apparently banal situation, she reminds us what literature is about' – Anthony Burgess
'Mary Lavin measures up to greatness because of art and craft and style and vision, and of understanding of the heart, because of ruthless addiction to truth and also because of pity and humour' – Benedict Kiely
'Mary Lavin's stories are a delight. They are delicate, but not too delicate to carry tragedy on one shoulder and comedy on the other' – Adrian Mitchell
'One of the most distinguished of living Irish writers' - The New York Times
