William Trevor

William Trevor's Last Stories is forthcoming from Viking. A New York Times Bestseller and Notable Book From the winner of the 1999 David Cohen British Literature Prize comes an unforgettably chilling novel, written with the compassion and artistry that define Trevor's fiction. There were three deaths that summer. The first was Letitia’s, sudden and quite unexpected, leaving her husband, Thaddeus, haunted by the details of her last afternoon. The next death came some weeks later, after Thaddeus’s mother-in-law helped him to interview for a nanny to bring up their baby. None of the applicants were suitable—least of all the last one, with her sharp features, her shabby clothes that reeked of cigarettes, her badly typed references—so Letitia’s mother moved herself in. But then, just as the household was beginning to settle down, the last of the nannies surprisingly returned, her unwelcome arrival heralding the third of the summer tragedies. “William Trevor is an extraordinarily mellifluous writer, seemingly incapable of composing an ungraceful sentence. . . . His skill is very real, and equals his great compassion. With Death in Summer, these two qualities combine in a beautiful and resonant way.”—The New York Time Book Review “Possibly the most perfect of Trevor’s novels . . . Astonishing.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “Beautifully paced and mesmerizing . . . Offering us a compelling mystery on many levels through . . . finely drawn, perfect glimpses of touchingly imperfect lives.”—The Washington Post Book World Nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize

William Trevor has long been hailed as one of the greatest living writers of short fiction. These nineteen stories--selected by Trevor himself from The Collected Stories and After Rain--capture the nuances of rural and middle-class life in the Ireland he knows so well. Here are its people, their lives driven by love, faith, and duty, surviving in a culture that blends tradition with transformation. In spare and eloquent prose Trevor's stories engage and provoke us as only the best fiction can.

After Rain - Twelve remarkable stories by the master storyteller William Trevor 'There is no better short story writer in the English-speaking world' Wall Street JournalIn this collection of twelve dazzling, acutely rendered tales, William Trevor plumbs the depths of the human heart. Here we encounter a blind piano tuner whose wonderful memories of his first wife are cruelly distorted by his second; a woman in a difficult marriage who must choose between her indignant husband and her closest friend; two children, survivors of divorce, who mimic their parents' melodramas; and a heartbroken woman traveling alone in Italy who experiences an epiphany while studying a forgotten artist's Annunciation. Trevor is, in his own words, 'a storyteller. My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so.' Conscious or not, he touches us in ways that few writers even dare to try.

Perfectly executed and chilling... a sad and oddly moving tale of lost opportunities and misplaced hopes.--The New York Times "Trevor was our twentieth century Chekov.--Wall Street Journal Felicia is unmarried, pregnant, and penniless. She steals away from a small Irish town and drifts through the industrial English Midlands, searching for the boyfriend who left her. Instead she meets up with the fat, fiftyish, unfailingly reasonable Mr. Hilditch, who is looking for a new friend to join the five other girls in his Memory Lane. But the strange, sad, terrifying tricks of chance unravel both his and Felicia's delusions in a story that will magnetize fans of Alfred Hitchcock and Ruth Rendell even as it resonates with William Trevor's own impeccable strength and piercing profundity (The Washington Post Book World).

Full of hope, seventeen-year old Felicia crosses the Irish sea to the English Midlands in search of her lover Johnny to tell him she is pregnant. Unable to find him, alone and desperate, she is found instead by Mr. Hilditch, an obese catering manger, collector and befriender of homeless girls, who is also searching in a way Felicia could never have imagined..."