Bernard MacLaverty’s short stories and novels flow as easily as conversation but writing them is painstaking. “At the age of 79 I still find it is very difficult to write,” Mr. MacLaverty said last month. “Everything has to be exact . . . You just can’t scribble off a line.”

“Blank Pages” is his seventh volume of stories, and the first since his “Collected Stories” of 2013. Amid the oversharing and self-promotion fostered by social media and reality TV, Mr. MacLaverty’s polished, unadorned prose seems almost quaint. He infuses...

Bernard MacLaverty’s short stories and novels flow as easily as conversation but writing them is painstaking. “At the age of 79 I still find it is very difficult to write,” Mr. MacLaverty said last month. “Everything has to be exact . . . You just can’t scribble off a line.”

“Blank Pages” is his seventh volume of stories, and the first since his “Collected Stories” of 2013. Amid the oversharing and self-promotion fostered by social media and reality TV, Mr. MacLaverty’s polished, unadorned prose seems almost quaint. He infuses domestic scenes with menace—such as the moment when a man looking after his grandchildren fears he has lost them—and ruminates on life, love, faith, the power of music and the palliative effect of motion.

In “Soup Mix,” one of the 12 new stories brought together here, a son visiting his elderly mother makes sure the officials at her nursing home are aware of his effort, lest he “lose Brownie points.” In “The Fairly Good Samaritan,” a pensioner spends his time drinking and playing solitaire “with a pack of cards which is so swollen with use that, when he handles a new deck in the pub, he thinks at least half of them are missing.”

Mr. MacLaverty describes much of this collection as “redemption or resurrection stories”—such as “A Love Picture: Belfast 1940,” in which a mother is nearly unhinged by the news that her son may be dead. In the spooky “Night Work,” a woman casts a death mask of a mathematician just hours after he has expired. And in “The End of Days: Vienna 1918,” Mr. MacLaverty—who was home in Glasgow as Covid spread around the world—imagines the final days of Austrian artist Egon Schiele and his wife, Edith, who perished in the Spanish flu pandemic.

Although he has lived in Scotland for more than 40 years, the Belfast-born author sets much of his fiction in his native country. Mr. MacLaverty’s Ireland isn’t a cloying caricature of lush meadows and magic. Rather, it is a place of raw beauty, unforgiving weather, and inexplicable violence, sadness and joy, where laughter, prayer and often alcohol help drown out an unrelenting descant of despair.

Mr. MacLaverty has published five novels and written several screenplays, including one for “Cal,” his 1983 novel about a young man caught up in the Troubles—the strife between Irish Catholic nationalists and British Protestant unionists that roiled Northern Ireland from the late 1960s through the ’90s. Mr. MacLaverty and his wife fled the Troubles, emigrating in 1975 to Scotland, where they raised their family. He turned to writing full time after working for a decade as a medical lab technician and then several years as a high-school teacher.

Captivated by the precision and musical quality of words, Mr. MacLaverty as a boy jotted down phrases his grandparents and great aunt used. In “Searching: Belfast 1971,” a story in “Blank Pages,” British soldiers raid a home in Belfast. The story is more reporting than fiction because “it happened to my mother and my grandma that the army broke into their house,” he said. His mother told him about it and “I put it to the back of my head and it took 30 years to find its own shape.”

Short stories are an ideal gateway to Mr. MacLaverty’s oeuvre, delivering in a few pages a burst of the sere prose and perception found in his novels. The latter, such as “Midwinter Break” (2017) and “Grace Notes” (1997), deliver outsize emotional wallops. In “Midwinter Break,” a long-married couple head to Amsterdam for a getaway—and contemplate divorce. In “Grace Notes,” which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, a composer flails through personal and professional rapids. And while “Cal”—at just over 150 pages—has Mr. MacLaverty’s signature humor and exquisite spare dialogue, it thrums with foreboding. The tortured title character seems to exist on cigarettes, whisky and longing.

Many MacLaverty characters fall into one of two groups: observant Catholics, and those who used to be. Although the author is in the latter camp, he was an altar boy and stockpiled memories of serving at Latin masses for his fiction. “Religion both terrified and elevated me,” he writes in the introduction to “Collected Stories.” “It dominated my childhood.” And “the Latin we parroted as altar boys . . . Not having a clue what it meant we were in love with the sound of it—and the grandeur it lent to our Belfast accents.”

His 1982 collection “A Time to Dance” shows Mr. MacLaverty homing in on themes such as independence, the loss of innocence and the end of life. In the story “My Dear Palestrina,” a talented youngster’s music lessons stop after his scandalized parents learn that his unmarried piano teacher is pregnant.

In 2006’s “Matters of Life & Death,” his descriptive powers dazzle in “Visiting Takabuti,” the story of a woman whose young nephews are transfixed by a mummy in an Ulster museum. “The thing was completely wrapped except for its head and a withered hand. It wore a cape of blue earthenware beads. The hand, thin as a backscratcher, had stained the wrapping it rested on. Her lips were liquorice black but slightly open showing white teeth. The nose, a snapped-off beak.”

In the same volume, Mr. MacLaverty casts a clear, empathetic eye on events of peril and heart-stopping fear. A Scotsman who is a visiting professor in Iowa becomes lost in a blizzard. With each moment—he loses a glove and becomes disoriented—the reader prepares for the worst, only to have things resolve in warmth and good news. By contrast, the rape on a remote seashore—of an artist who has retreated there to luxuriate in solitude—has images of nature’s magnificence flecked in amid a barbaric assault.

Though hemmed in by life, his characters remain in transit—trudging through airports, skittering along rain-stained streets or lost in thought on buses. Even the seabirds spotted by a traveler aboard a ferry in a story in “Blank Pages” are on the move: “They’d kept abreast now for about 15 minutes, moving up to deck level, now dropping to skim the sea. Sometimes beating their wings, sometimes gliding. But always keeping their formation. . . . Their flying seemed to have such urgency and grace.”

—Ms. Cronin is an associate editorial features editor on the Journal’s opinion pages.