- Home
- Fiction
- Contemporary Fiction
- Multitudes
Multitudes
Multitudes is the beautiful debut story collection from the acclaimed, prize-winning novelist and playwright Lucy Caldwell
Join Faber Members for 10% off your first order.
‘Beautifully crafted, and so finely balanced that she holds the reader right up against the tender humanity of her characters.’ Eimear McBride
‘A writer of rare elegance and beauty, Caldwell doesn’t just get inside her characters’ minds. She perches in the precarious chambers of their hearts, telling their stories truthfully and tenderly.’ Independent
Multitudes is the beautiful debut story collection from the acclaimed, prize-winning novelist and playwright Lucy Caldwell
From Belfast to London and back again the ten stories that comprise Caldwell’s first collection explore the many facets of growing up – the pain and the heartache, the tenderness and the joy, the fleeting and the formative – or ‘the drunkenness of things being various’. Stories of longing and belonging, they culminate with the heart-wrenching and unforgettable title story.
'A clear, calm voice in your ear.'
'?The stories in Multitudes collectively work as a sort of kaleidoscopic bildungsroman ... a lively, humane book, gritty but wholehearted, and it offers an ultimately optimistic, progressive vision for the city of Belfast and the women who come from there, while never forgetting what has come before.'
'An underhyped Irish writer? They do exist. Lucy Caldwell ... writes an understated, conversational prose that never advertises itself unduly ... Multitudes is her debut collection, and it's brilliant ... Like Joyce's Dubliners, Multitudes begins with stories of childhood, moves on through stories of adolescence, and ends with stories of maturity.'
'Affecting and truthful ... Caldwell's poignant stories combine to describe a collection of moments that shape and define us.'
Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1981. She is the author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and two collections of short stories: Multitudes and Intimacies. She won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2021 for ‘All the People Were Mean and Bad’. Other awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the George Devine…
Read MoreBrowse a selection of books we think you might also like, with genre matches and a few wildcards thrown in.
Lucy Caldwell, author of Intimacies and new collection Openings, shares five of her favourite short stories to read, from childhood …
How do you write a city that hasn’t decided what it’s going to be next? In the latest of our …
As the summer holidays approach, we’re beginning to think about which books to pack for our holiday reading. The Faber …
Lucy Caldwell describes the inspiration behind These Days which this month won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.
Lucy Caldwell, author of Intimacies, tells us why short story collections matter – both to readers and to writers – …