On a promontory jutting out into the Atlantic wind stands the home run by Brother Benedict, where boys are taught a little of God and a lot of fear. To Michael Lamb, one of the Brothers, the regime is without hope, and when he inherits a small legacy he runs away, taking a 12-year-old boy with him.

A haunting love story set against the grim backdrop of fear and violence in Northern Ireland.
For Cal, some of the choices are devastatingly simple... He can work in an abattoir that nauseates him or join the dole queue; he can brood on his past or plan a future with Marcella. Springing out of the fear and violence of Ulster, Cal is a haunting love story in a land where tenderness and innocence can only flicker briefly in the dark.

A young composer returns to Belfast for her father's funeral. Memories of the claustrophobic enclave and her fastidious, nagging mother, remind her of why she left in the first place. The healing effect of music figures prominently in this novel.

`Midwinter Break is a work of extraordinary emotional precision and sympathy, about coming to terms - to an honest reckoning - with love and the loss of love, with memory and pain.

Set in the Northern Ireland of the 1980s, Cal tells the story of a young Catholic man living in a Protestant area.