Devotions

by Lucy Caldwell

The highly-anticipated new collection from the BBC National Short Story Award-winning author of Multitudes, Intimacies and Openings

'There must be moments when we let go - let go of all that we do, all that we are.'

A young Belfast theatre troupe brings its experimental production of Hamlet to New York.

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 love, grief, longing, of new beginnings, and the ways we find shelter in each other.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Irish Literature, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Ireland, Literature

208 pages, Paperback

Published April 23, 2026

Reviews

[emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

i love a little book.

mini reviews for each story:


HAMLET, A LOVE STORY
damn. this got me in every way. i was rooting for every outcome, sad over every tragedy, endlessly interested in every artistic choice and every work and every decision.

i didn’t want it to end.
rating: 5


A FAMILY CHRISTMAS
just as well written with the same precise punchy details redolent in unspoken emotion, but with a bit more gimmicky of an ending. or maybe i just bought in less.
rating: 4


LITTLE LANDS
this is basically a long form article about the sound of music, so obviously i loved it and it made me cry.
rating: 5


THE DAY HE MET JESUS
maybe i’m losing my marbles. this one made me tear up too.
rating: 4.5


HARMONY HILL
finally a miss (i don't care that much about music and generally can't relate to people who really, really do).
rating: 3


ALL GROWN UP
oh no. what the hell is going on! i'm tearing up again!
rating: 5


THE LADY OF THE HOUSE
vibe shift. it's ghost story time.
rating: 3.5


DEVOTIONS
simple. lovely. what the hell.
rating: 4


OVERALL
i am shocked by how much i enjoyed this small book and how much i didn't want it to end. some of these stories may very well stay with me for the rest of my life.

sweet and deceptively light tales of paths untaken and hopes dashed and happiness, or the chance of it, found anyway. what better themes to read of right now?
rating: 4.5


(thanks to the publisher for the copy)

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Devotions is a collection of eight short stories by Lucy Caldwell, all either set in or with a nexus in Northern Ireland which is Caldwell’s home. The stories are quite varied in subject but reveal characters at vulnerable points in their lives where physical, emotional, spiritual or other problems are overwhelming them. She handles each story individually in a way arising from the situation. I’m struck by her skills and plan to seek out her earlier collections.

My favorite stories here are “Hamlet, a love story”, in which a punk version of Hamlet brought from Northern Ireland is ending its run in New York; “Little lands”, a fly’s eye view of the making of The Sound of Music— one scene in particular; “Harmony Hill”, a story of music; “All grown up”, a man’s reaction to his mother’s death; and “The lady of the house”, which seems to be a search for inspiration.

Recommended for short story readers.


Thanks to Faber & Faber and NetGalley for an opportunity to read an eARC of this book.

[Seawitch · Rating 4 out of 5]

As in almost all short story collections, some connect better than others. This was a new to me author who writes in a sort of directed stream of consciousness style. The stories have roots in Northern Ireland, even if some are set elsewhere.

Themes include: theater life, music performance, motherhood and reproductive decisions, the Sound of Music and a Hollywood story versus what was real, loss and grief, local cultural history.

There is a bit of a Sally Rooney feel to the writing - the narrators are not of my generation, but interestingly millennial.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

[Nat · Rating 3 out of 5]

it was worth it for the Sound of Music essay.
but in general, reading this felt like standing in front of a really well-acclaimed post-modern art piece and seeing it and understanding logically that it is very good and understanding what it is supposed to make you feel whilst also not feeling anything.
oopsie - i feel bad, i see that it should be so good but i don't think i'm the type of person who would get it and that's ok. too much of a 22 year old Christian whose hope is not in the world.

[Marinela Florea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hamlet - A Love Story - 5*

A Family Christmas - 4*

Little Lands - 4*

The Day He Met Jesus - 3*

Harmony Hill - 5*

All Grown Up - 4*

The Lady of the House - 4*

Devotions - 3*

[Barbara McVeigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

5+
If you love short stories, read this collection.

[Anya · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first book I have read by a Northern Irish writer which isn’t about “the troubles”- thank God for that! Coming from Northern Ireland myself I so enjoyed the mentions of places I know, language and unique English slang that I recognise and the subtle references to the complexities of the northern Irish upbringing whilst living abroad. This is a fantastic collection of short stories, some which are more touching than other. I definitely want to read more by this talented author!

[Becky Swales-Blanchard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my first time reading anything of Caldwell's but I will definitely be reading more! Caldwell's writing has lots of really tender, almost throwaway moments which really flesh out the whole thing. I would have loved to read a full length novel of any of these but really loved 'Hamlet, A Love Story'.

[hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

thank you faber for the gifted proof copy.
potentially the greatest short story collection i have ever read. adored caldwell's writing style, every short story evoked so much emotion.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lucy Caldwell’s new collection, “Devotions,” begins in a posture that would have seemed, not long ago, almost embarrassingly unliterary: a woman in bed, phone balanced on her knees, watching a livestream. Below her, children argue over breakfast; beside her, a cat insists on its small, bodily claims. Onscreen, the chat floods with salutations from around the world, the bright, breathless fellowship of strangers gathering for the winter solstice at Newgrange. It is a scene of ordinary modern life – domestic, distracted, faintly ashamed of itself – and it is also a portal. Caldwell is very good at portals: not the fantasy kind, but the ones we live inside and rarely name, the thin places where the banal admits a pressure from elsewhere. By the time that livestream offers its beam of light – a narrow, ancient certainty cutting into an Irish tomb built before the pyramids at Giza – Caldwell has staged, with quiet audacity, a contest between contemporary speed and deep time, between the tyranny of usefulness and the human need to surrender to something that cannot be optimized.

“Devotions” is, on paper, a collection of eight stories. In practice, it reads like an argument for the form itself: not the short story as neat mechanism, but as a container capable of holding what our era most fears – duration, irresolution, reverence without doctrine, attention without pay-off. It is a book preoccupied with the ways we live amid forces we cannot fully interpret: grief that changes shape instead of ending, motherhood that is both miracle and depletion, history that doesn’t stay put, art that can be salvation in one sentence and extraction in the next. Caldwell has long been a writer of intimacy in the strict sense: not mere closeness, but the proximity at which a life becomes morally legible. Here, that intimacy widens into something more spectral. The stories are haunted – sometimes literally, often ethically – by what remains when we leave a room: the residue of despair, the stubbornness of love, the ache of what has been prayed for and what has not.

The title story’s virtuosity is its refusal to posture. Caldwell understands that contemporary spirituality tends to arrive through the side door: a forwarded post, a feed, a “just curious” click that turns into a quiet compulsion. The narrator is not a believer in any tidy way; she is a person trying to survive winter, parenthood, and the modern compulsion to translate living into productivity. The luminous sections in “Devotions” are not the most obviously “poetic” ones. They are the moments when Caldwell lets the mind do what it does under pressure: ricochet. A solstice becomes a meditation on marriage as a long metamorphosis, on the bodily fact of cellular renewal and the persistence of the self, on an archaeology article about Ice Age children drawing charcoal scribbles that earlier excavators mistakenly dignified as “enigmatic signs.” That last detail – the sober adult desire to decode what is, in truth, simply a child’s hand learning itself – could stand as a parable for the entire collection. Caldwell is fascinated by the interpretive impulse, by our need to make meaning, and by the violence we sometimes do in the act of making it.

You can feel, beneath the story’s solstice glow, a weather system of contemporary dread: climate instability named plainly, the slow darkening of winters, the way even summer can feel less like triumph than like a countdown. But Caldwell’s gift is that she will not convert dread into a speech. She understands that what we call “current events” is often, for most people, lived as atmosphere: a sense of the air changing, the pressure dropping, the light thinning. A livestreamed ritual becomes, in her hands, a secular sacrament and a study in the modern bargain: we crave awe, but we experience it mediated, miniaturized, framed by obligation. The narrator remembers, with the sting of an old wound, an earlier pilgrimage to “Stonehenge” that failed to deliver transcendence, as if the self’s inability to feel properly were a moral flaw. That fear – that there is something lacking in us, that we are not correctly calibrated for wonder – appears throughout “Devotions” in different guises. Caldwell treats it not as pathology but as a central modern ache.

If “Devotions” is the collection’s thesis on surrender, “The Lady of the House” is its thesis on appetite – the appetite of the past, the appetite of despair, the appetite of art. Written in the second person, it begins with a classic horror mechanism: you wake from a nightmare into a room that seems to have inherited the nightmare’s presence. The story’s setting is exquisitely chosen for a certain strain of contemporary longing: a converted gatehouse tower in Aberdeenshire, the ruin of an eleventh-century castle repurposed into an Instagrammable dream of sheepskins, tartan, antiques, and curated rusticity. Caldwell has a sharp eye for the aesthetics of refuge – and for how easily refuge curdles into a stage set. The narrator is a young actor, two years out of drama school, successful “on paper,” yet gnawed by the feeling that something inside her is closed, blank, insufficiently real. She has come north to her older sister – newly a mother after years of IVF – hoping for advice, for anchoring. Instead, she finds a landscape thick with history and a house that seems to store more than objects.

In less sure hands, “The Lady of the House” might have been satisfied with its ghost. Caldwell uses the supernatural as a lever to pry open a more disturbing question: what does it mean to “channel” someone else’s despair? Acting training teaches you to locate the harmonic inside yourself, the tiny seam of grief or fury that can be amplified into believable performance. Caldwell turns that pedagogy into a metaphysics: perhaps stories, too, seek their harmonics. Perhaps a woman’s old despair recognizes a latent frequency in a young woman and takes hold. Perhaps the past is not merely remembered but recruited. The apparition in this story is ambiguous in the best way: it might be a malign presence, or it might be the psychic residue of sorrow, or it might be the narrator’s own hunger given form. The ethical chill arrives when the narrator begins to imagine turning the “Green Lady” into art – a first play, a starring role, a story of “female despair” and “witches” that will, she believes, finally unlock her range. In that moment, the story pivots from Gothic to critique: of creative ambition, of the temptation to extract beauty from suffering, of how easily empathy can become a claim of ownership.

Caldwell’s intelligence is never simply conceptual; it is sentence-level. She can move from the tactile comedy of family memory – one leg self-tanned on a holiday, the rule that you must eat two nuts for every raisin – into the gutting revelation of what IVF has done to a person’s body and selfhood. She can sketch a sister’s exhaustion in a few details: thinning hair, hooded eyes, a gratitude so raw it hurts to witness. That exhaustion is not incidental. “Devotions” is full of people trying to keep themselves intact while caring for others: mothers, daughters, spouses, artists. The stories take place against a background that feels recognizably ours: overstretched time, porous boundaries between work and home, the modern shame of wanting to stop. There is a quiet politics in Caldwell’s insistence that devotion is not synonymous with productivity. Her characters are not seeking a brand of wellness. They are seeking, more modestly and more radically, permission to be human.

Caldwell’s affinities are visible, and she does not seem interested in disguising them. You can feel, in “A Family Christmas,” the long shadow of “The Dead,” not as homage but as a psychic argument with a predecessor: what does it mean, now, to stage a holiday gathering as a site of revelation when revelation itself can feel like an imposition? Across the collection, Caldwell’s sense of time – folded, recursive, porous – recalls the clean, listening architecture of Rachel Cusk’s “Outline,” where meaning arrives through attention rather than event. And in the best stories, particularly those that braid private life with history and ritual, there is something of Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s “A Ghost in the Throat”: that sense that devotion can be a form of haunting, and that to love a story is sometimes to risk being possessed by it.

But Caldwell is not a mimic. Her sensibility is distinctly her own: Irish, yes, but not parochial; lyric, but not ornamental; emotionally frank without confession as performance. The story about the professional musician traveling “across the world and through her memories with a violin older than the United States” is described, even in premise, as a kind of secular inheritance tale: the instrument as relic, as burden, as continuity. “Harmony Hill,” commissioned for the BBC Proms, is likewise concerned with music as devotion – discipline, lineage, the body as archive. One of Caldwell’s recurring miracles is her ability to treat craft not as mere detail but as a moral language. Music, acting, even the running of a household: these are presented as practices of attention, each with its own temptations toward vanity and its own possibilities for grace.

Grace is a word Caldwell handles carefully. In “Devotions,” grace is not a reward for virtue; it is an “unsought-for gift,” arriving, if it arrives, when the self stops clenching. This is why the book feels contemporary in a way that has nothing to do with topicality. We live in a culture that treats interior life as content and solitude as failure. We are taught to narrate ourselves in public – to produce meaning quickly, to turn experience into evidence. Caldwell’s stories resist that entire economy. They ask what it costs to live always translating, always extracting, always trying to make one’s life legible to an imagined audience. The stories are interested in social media and livestreams not because Caldwell wants to be “relevant,” but because these are now among the primary sites where people seek ritual, community, and consolation. A solstice livestream is not a gimmick; it is, for many, the only available altar.

That said, the book’s virtues occasionally create their own risk. Caldwell’s intelligence can, at moments, drift toward explicating its own wonder. A few passages in the title story flirt with the essayistic, with the voice stepping slightly ahead of the lived moment to name the theme. This is not a fatal flaw – the writing is too alive for that – but it is the reason the book does not reach the icy perfection of a Munro at her most ruthless. Caldwell’s generosity sometimes shows its seams. She wants, you feel, to bring the reader along, to make the coordinates “real and precise,” to use her own phrase, and the impulse can lead to a touch of overillumination.

Yet even this is consistent with the collection’s moral atmosphere. Caldwell is a writer of responsibility. Her stories are not content to be beautiful; they want to be accurate. They want to be fair to the mess of living, to the contradictory truth that a person can be exhausted and grateful, skeptical and yearning, ambitious and afraid of ambition. The collection’s hauntedness is not merely about ghosts; it is about inheritance in the broadest sense – the ways family stories lodge in the body, the ways history persists in place names and ruins, the way a mother’s fear migrates into a child’s future. “Devotions” is full of such migrations. It understands that what we call “faith” often survives the death of doctrine. It becomes, instead, a practice: showing up, listening, holding hands, waiting in the dark for a beam that may not arrive.

The finest achievement of “Devotions” may be its refusal to treat devotion as a virtue-signaling posture. In these stories, devotion is sometimes tender and sometimes terrifying. It can be a mother’s attention, a musician’s discipline, a writer’s loyalty to the sentence, a community’s midwinter gathering, a young actor’s desire to be inhabited by something “real.” It can also be a hunger that takes what it wants. “The Lady of the House” ends with a shiver of precisely that ambiguity: the suspicion that a story, once invited in, may not remain a story. Caldwell leaves us in that unsettled space – the space where art, memory, and the past press too close – and she does not resolve it into reassurance.

A great deal of contemporary literary fiction is either anxious to prove its relevance or determined to float above the mess of the moment. Caldwell does neither. She writes as if relevance were an insufficient aim and timelessness a kind of avoidance. Instead, she offers something rarer: a book that behaves like an instrument, tuned to the frequency of now without being trapped by it. Read “Devotions” in a year of climate dread, post-pandemic fatigue, and exhausted belief systems, and it feels not like commentary but like companionship. It reminds you that people have always lived with darkness, always tried to build structures – monuments, stories, rituals – that might hold them through it.

That is why, as a work of short fiction, “Devotions” earns a 91/100. It is not perfect, but it is deeply accomplished: intellectually serious without being stiff, emotionally bracing without being coercive, formally controlled while allowing mystery to remain mystery. It does what the best books do – it doesn’t merely tell you what devotion is. It changes, almost imperceptibly, the angle at which you look at your own attention, your own longing, your own winter.

[Nick Artrip · Rating 3 out of 5]

I requested and received an eARC of Devotions by Lucy Caldwell via NetGalley. In this collection of stories by the Northern Irish author Caldwell, readers are offered an intimate glimpse into the everyday rituals that transcend into personal acts of devotion. In "Hamlet, a Love Story" a widowed actress navigates loss and the waves of grief, while another story offers a close reading of the The Sound of Music. "All Grown Up" tells the story of a man who returns to Northern Ireland to clear out his childhood home following his mother's death, while "The Lady of the House" acts as a modern ghost story.

This is my first encounter with Caldwell’s writing, so I didn’t approach the text with any sort of notion about what I would be getting. I found it surprisingly easy to be lured in by Caldwell’s prose, which she clearly has a very strong command of. Each of these stories was emotionally resonant and packed a punch in a different way. The collection opens with “Hamlet, a Love Story”, which I think was a wise decision. This particular story really hooked me with the beautiful musings on art and grief and paired very nicely with the story that followed, “A Family Christmas.” I personally connected less with “Harmony Hill” and “Little Lands” but still found value in them within the collection as a whole.

“The Lady of the House” and “The Day He Met Jesus” were both tremendously interesting to me, especially the former. I will be thinking about both of them for some time to come. I really found the titular story, “Devotions”, to be quietly lovely. The real centerpiece of this collection, however, was “All Grown Up.” This story really struck me somewhere deep in the core. Ultimately, I really enjoyed Devotions. These are beautifully written stories that find profundity in the ordinary and take the reader on an emotional voyage.

[Paula W · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great collection of short stories this was! Devotions is full of love, grief, comfort, art, and the invaluable connections we make with each other.
There was one of the eight that didn’t really do it for me, but the others were so far above my expectations that I’m left awed. I have never read anything quite like these stories, and they reminded me how much I love Shakespeare, dancing, the sound a violin makes, The Sound of Music, my grandma’s tall tales, and the times I spent sharing my love of books and Broadway with my nieces.

Lucy Caldwell is obviously VERY GOOD at the art of writing short stories. She doesn’t write about a topic nor about one part of that topic, but she writes about an emotion felt for a part of the topic. She keeps digging and digging to get to what touches the heart of humanity. Then she writes about that. 4.75 stars from me.

Thanks to Faber & Faber, Lucy Caldwell (author), Edelweiss, and Libro.fm for the digital review copy and advance audiobook copy of Devotions (narrated by Lisa Dwyer Hogg, Louiza Patikas, and Matthew Forsythe). Their generosity did not influence my review in any way.

[Lyndsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been a fan of Lucy Caldwell’s since I read her short story collection Intimacies, so I have been eagerly awaiting this latest collection! These 8 short stories are not connected by plot but rather shared themes of grief, loneliness, self-reflection, and love. A common thread is artistry - from a Choose Your Own Adventure-style production of Hamlet, to a tender study of the iconic dance scene in The Sound of Music, to the poignant nostalgia of a concert violinist’s first cardboard practice instrument. There is also a haunted castle, Jesus disguised as a traffic cop, a solstice live stream, and a possible pregnancy at an impossible time. Wherever she takes you, the quiet beauty of Caldwell’s writing shines through in every story. She takes everyday moments and makes them resonate, and her stories are reflective and emotional in a way that makes you want to take careful stock of your life.

[Claire Inman]

Arc provided by Netgalley!

I’d seen that Lucy Caldwell was from Belfast, but I still didn’t expect so many of the stories in this book to feature Northern Irish characters. I grew up in N.I., so it was really lovely to see words like “banjaxed” or “baltic” written on the page. I’ve been craving a book like this, casually set in a place that is special to me. The market for Northern Irish stories (which is already very small) is oversaturated with books about the troubles. That’s not to say that those stories shouldn’t be told, it’s important to talk about N.I.’s history, but N.I. Is also so much more than that! It’s a place full of ordinary people living ordinary lives, sometimes tragic ones unrelated to sectarian violence. Devotions tells these stories. I’ll have to look into more of Lucy Caldwell’s work.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lucy Caldwell is for me, the best writer of short stories, I often find short stories really frustrating as they often leave a question unanswered and therefore feel unfinished to me. None of these stories are like that, they are perfect little capsules of perfectly formed fiction, in which you will be transported into that person's reality. Whether that's someone finding Jesus in Belfast, a musician travelling with a violin older than the US (imagine that!), or a troop of NI actors performing in New York. All the stories are wonderfully imbued with Northern Irishness that only adds to the pleasure. Definitely one to dip in and out of.

[Dol Leander · Rating 3 out of 5]

This title is a selection of vignettes tied so closely to the reality of devotion, it was both impossible to stop reading and difficult to continue on. Each sentence is purposefully tactile and even can find itself leaning toward essay when the situation calls for it. Beneath every character is an awareness of the state of the world. Instead of making these stories about this dread, Caldwell understands that for the vast majority of us, this is simply an atmosphere we all exist in as we must keep living our lives. And live, these characters certainly do. This collection is sure to resonate, as it manages a beautiful reflection on the everyday in an impressively short amount of time.

[Hannah Jung · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this. These stories were about topics as varied as Hamlet, The Sound of Music, The Winter Solstice and a haunted castle.

Each was beautiful in its own way, confronting the small, everyday worries and fears we all have and connecting them to the wider human experience.

I would compare Caldwell’s writing to authors such as Claire Keegan and Deborah Levy - intense, but calm, lyrical and poignant.

[Mary Pimbblet · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some fabulous stories in this collection, All Grown Up managed to read like a whole book on its own, it packs so into such a brief format.
Harmony Hill and the Lady of the House didn’t really appeal to me, ghosts and music aren’t really my thing, but the other stories were all really strong. Each story has some sort of link to the theme of devotion, all in different forms but fitting well together. There’s a simple beauty to the stories that makes them really memorable.

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was already a huge Lucy Caldwell fan, so my expectations were high, and yet she still exceeded them. This felt like a real evolution of her craft. As is the case with all the others, there are several stories here that I will continue to think about for some time.

Thanks to Faber and NetGalley for the arc 🙏❤️

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Average was 4.2.5 ⭐️. What a lovely short story compilation. Gave 5⭐️ to 4 of the 8 stories. The other 4 were 2 4⭐️ and 2 3⭐️.

Read this book over a few weeks. Enjoyed ending the day with another story. Will look out for anything else Lucy Caldwell writes.

[Ciarra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just reading this made me feel intellectually stimulated. A great read. Thank you Net Galley for this Arc.

[Apoorva · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some books which sing off the page and this is one of those.
As a proud lover of poetic prose, I liked this anthology.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Highlights:
All Grown Up
Devotions

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nobody does short stories quite like Lucy Caldwell!

[OPM · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hits home if you come from an Irish background. A few repetitive figures threw me off but overall worth a read.

[Luke Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you

[Viv Bannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just wonderful

[Tracy Hollen · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Venkatesan Snl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good book

[Kaylee · Rating 4 out of 5]

along with books written by poets, i love books written by playwrights! this was such a great little collection, and particularly the first three stories were fantastic. i listened to this, which i usually don't do for short stories, so i'd like to give it a re-read down the road.