William Trevor

It's summer and nothing much is happening in Rathmoye. So it doesn't go unnoticed when a dark-haired stranger appears on his bicycle and begins photographing the mourners at Mrs. Connulty's funeral. Florian Kilderry couldn't know that the Connultys are said to own half the town: he has only come to Rathmoye to photograph the scorched remains of its burnt- out cinema.A few miles out in the country, Dillahan, a farmer and a decent man, has married again: Ellie is the young convent girl who came to work for him when he was widowed. Ellie leads a quiet, routine life, often alone while Dillahan runs the farm.Florian is planning to leave Ireland and start over. Ellie is settled in her new role as Dillahan's wife. But Florian's visit to Rathmoye introduces him to Ellie, and a dangerously reckless attachment begins.In a characteristically masterly way Trevor evokes the passions and frustrations felt by Ellie and Florian, and by the people of a small Irish town during one long summer.

The publication of a new book by William Trevor is a great literary event. Trevor's last collection, A Bit on the Side, was named a New York Times Notable Book and hailed as one of the Best Books of the Year by papers from coast to coast, including The Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle. And his earlier collection, After Rain, published in 1996, was named one of the eight best books of the year by The New York Times.Trevor's precise and unflinching insights into the hearts and lives of ordinary people are evidenced once again in this stunning new collection. From a chance encounter between two childhood friends to the memories of a newly widowed man to a family grappling with the sale of their ancestral land, Trevor examines with grace and skill the tenuous bonds of our relationships, the strengths that hold us together, and the truths that threaten to separate us. Subtle yet powerful, his stories linger with the reader long after the words have been put away.

A radiant reflection of contemporary fiction at its best, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2006 features stories from locales as diverse as Russia, Zimbabwe, and the rural American South. Series editor Laura Furman considered thousands of stories in hundreds of literary magazines before selecting the winners, which are accompanied here by short essays from each of the three eminent jurors on his or her favorite story, as well as observations from all twenty prize winners on what inspired them. Ranging in tone from arch humor to self-deluding obsessiveness to fairy-tale ingenuousness, these stories are a treasury of potential classics.From the Trade Paperback edition.

William Trevor is truly a Chekhov for our age, and a new collection of stories from him is always a cause for celebration. In these twelve stories, a waiter divulges a shocking life of crime to his ex-wife; a woman repeats the story of her parents' unstable marriage after a horrible tragedy; a schoolgirl regrets gossiping about the cuckolded man who tutors her; and, in the volume's title story, a middle-aged accountant offers his reasons for ending a love affair. At the heart of this stunning collection is Trevor's characteristic tenderness and unflinching eye for both the humanizing and dehumanizing aspects of modern urban and rural life.

"Captain Gault had seen off the three intruders easily enough. They had come in the night with the intention of firing the house, but a single shot had sent them scuttling back into the darkness. One, though, had been wounded and for that the Gaults were not forgiven: sooner or later there would be trouble again. Other big-house families had been driven out - the Morells from Clashmore, the Gouvernets, the Priors, the Swifts. It was time to go too.". "But Lucy, soon to be nine, the only child of the household, could not bear the thought of leaving Lahardane. Her world was the old house itself, the woods of the glen, the farm animals, the walk along the seashore to school. All of that she loved and as the day of departure grew closer she determined that this exile should not take place. But chance changed everything, bringing about a calamity so terrible that it might have been a punishment, so vicious that it blighted the lives of all the Gaults for many years to come.". "William Trevor's new novel begins in rural Cork in 1921, in a country still in turmoil. The old order has fragmented, a way of life is already over. Trevor brilliantly conveys the disquiet and confusion that colour the story of Lucy Gault as it's told while it happens, in towns and countryside, and told again when passing has made it different."--BOOK JACKET.

Forty-five short stories that span the entire history of the Irish short story, feature works by such masters as James Joyce and Elizabeth Bowen, as well as new voices, including Bernard McLaverty and Desmond Hogan.

A young Irish girl overcomes the death of a beloved storyteller with the help of her grandmother who takes her on a trip.

"In William Trevor's first novel, The Old Boys, a group of septuagenarians revive schoolboy conflicts in the election of the President of the Association. Now, however, the men possess a fiercer understanding of the things in life that matter - power, revenge, hatred, love, and the failure of love - and intrigue and deceit result.". "In The Boarding-House, William Wagner Bird takes in boarders whom society would never miss - if it ever noticed they were around. With these misfits, Bird creates a world where people are identified by their quirks rather than by their character. Then he makes a fatal mistake: he dies.". "From the offices of The Love Department, Lady Dolores cures the heartaches of the lonely wives of Wimbledon with inimitable flourish and finesse. When her newest protege, Edward Blakeston-Smith, is sent on a mission - to learn the secrets of seductive, scheming Septimus Tuam and stop him in his tracks - he learns about love and its friends and enemies."--BOOK JACKET.

"The Hill Bachelors contains a dozen new stories, set mostly but not entirely in Ireland.". "In 'Three People', an ageing father waits for the proposal for his daughter that will never come from the man who once told a lie to save her; in 'Against the Odds', a con-woman who has plied her trade across the entire Six Counties fixes this time on a widower in a small inland town; and in the poignant title-story, the youngest son returns for his father's funeral to the family hill farm to find it has become his unwelcome inheritance.". "William Trevor writes about the lonely and the sad, about those who have something to hide and those who barely have control over their lives."--BOOK JACKET.

A chilling new novel by the author of Felicia's Journey. After both his wife and mother-in-law die suddenly, Thaddeus's household seems to settle down. But then an unwelcome guest appears, heralding the third and final of the summer tragedies.

A psychological horror story in which a man helps women in distress, only to murder them. The story is told through the eyes of an Irish girl who escapes the fate that befell the others. The setting is Britain. By the author of Two Lives.

"Love becomes life," Roger Angell proposes in his Introduction to Nothing But You: Love Stories from The New Yorker, and the variety of his meticulous and generous selection - thirty-eight stories, the first anthology of New Yorker fiction in three decades - proves his point. With pleasure, sadness, yearning, and dismay, we follow these subtle and surprising investigators of ourselves in love, from the seizures of erotic passion to the revisited depths of romantic despair. Taken separately, these stories suggest the infinite variety of the human heart. Taken together, they are a literary milestone, a comprehensive review of the way we live and love now.

This collection looks at the years of innocence, the pains and pleasures of schooldays and the struggles of adolescence in stories by such writers as Seamus Heaney, Roddy Doyle, Flann O'Brien, William Trevor, Bryan MacMahon, Samuel Beckett, Neil Jordan, Sean O'Faolain, Edna O'Brien, Brian Friel, Maeve Binchy, Brendan Behan and many more.

Chosen by the editors of The New York Times Book Review as one of the eight best books of 1996, and by the Boston Globe as one of the six best books of fiction of 1996 -- Appeared on several bestseller lists, including The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, New York Newsday, San Francisco Chronicle, and The Village Voice Literary Supplement -- William Trevor was the recipient of a 1996 Lannan Literary Award for fiction -- Felicia's Journey, William Trevor's previous national bestseller, won England's prestigious Whitbread Fiction Prize and the Sunday Express Prize. -- American Library Association Notable Book William Trevor has long been hailed as one of the greatest living writers of the short story. In this collection of twelve dazzling, acutely rendered tales, he once again plumbs the depths of the human heart. Here we meet 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 chose between her indignant husband and her closest friend; two children, survivors of divorce, who mimic their parents' melodramas; a heartbroken woman traveling alone in Italy who experiences an epiphany 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.

As governess to her wealthy cousins, the Rollestons, on the eve of World War I, Sarah Pollexfen is only vaguely aware of the dark rituals and painful secrets that haunt the seemingly tranquil garden.