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Aging, illness, and death provide the recurring chords in this satisfying concerto of new stories.

A blocked writer finds a use for blank typing paper by laying it on his carpet to check for fleas, but he soon turns to dealing with his late wife’s ailing cat. When a strange noise disturbs a woman, she notices many daddy longlegs in her house before going out to find her wandering, dementia-suffering mother. In 1940, a mother hears that her son, presumed dead after his ship recently was torpedoed, may be visible in a newsreel featuring survivors. In his sixth collection, the 79-year-old, Belfast-born MacLaverty brings humor, sympathy, and an unshowy eloquence to the conventional short story. He knows what disquiets the aging—the strange noises that jar a home’s familiar silence; the suddenly absent grandchild—and the anxieties of those with an elderly parent. Returning to his hometown for a business meeting, a man worries about his mother’s increasing distractedness and about getting credit for being a good son. A woman shleps her harp back home to entertain her crippled father and then plays for passengers on the return ferry. (MacLaverty doesn’t shy from big symbols like a harp in an Irish setting.) One of the four stories with historical settings, and the collection’s standout, is “The End of Days: Vienna 1918,” in which the artist Egon Schiele cares for his pregnant wife as she lies dying from Spanish flu. MacLaverty's mastery is evident throughout, in carefully chosen details, in the way he illuminates the inescapable need to create that compels Schiele to sketch the corpse, and in the framing of the story with two different keyhole references—alluding perhaps to the voyeurism of Schiele’s own art and the story’s invasion of his private suffering.

A fine collection by a true craftsman, thematically rich and deeply humane.