'You're beautiful,' Johnny told her and so, full of hope, seventeen-year-old Felicia crosses the Irish Sea to England to find her lover and tell him she is pregnant. Desperately searching for Johnny in the bleak post-industrial Midlands, she is, instead, found by Mr Hilditch, a strange and lonely man, a collector and befriender of homeless young girls...William Trevor's tightly woven psychological thriller won the 1994 Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award. Susan Hill described it as, 'A masterpiece. You read and are dazzled. It has one of the most memorable and convincing, most sinister and terrifying of characters created in the modern novel.'

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 parentsa unstable marriage after a horrible tragedy; a schoolgirl regrets gossiping about the cuckolded man who tutors her; and, in the volumeas title story, a middle-aged accountant offers his reasons for ending a love affair. At the heart of this stunning collection is Trevoras characteristic tenderness and unflinching eye for both the humanizing and dehumanizing aspects of modern urban and rural life.

Captain Gault has decided that his family must leave Lahardane. They are after all Protestants living in the big house in rural Cork, and the country is in turmoil. It is 1921. But 8-year-old Lucy can't bear to leave the seashore, the old house, the woods - so she hatches a plan. It is then that the calamity happens - an accident almost, but so vicious in its consequences that it blights the lives of the Gaults for years to come. Trevor's new novel beautifully evokes rural Ireland and the tensions existing there, but also is Hardy-like in its portrayal of the impact of mere chance on a life.

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 Mr. Hilditch, who is looking for a new friend to join the five other girls in his Memory Lane. But 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).
"A page-turner marked by brilliant psychological suspense."-- The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Perfectly executed and chilling. . . . A sad and oddly moving tale of lost opportunities and misplaced hopes."-- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
A New York Times Notable Book
Winner of the Whitbread Fiction Prize and the Sunday Express Prize
Felicia's Journey appeared on the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Newsday, and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists

The stunning new novel from highly acclaimed author William Trevor is a brilliant, subtle, and moving story of love, guilt, and forgiveness. The Gault family leads a life of privilege in early 1920s Ireland, but the threat of violence leads the parents of nine-year-old Lucy to decide to leave for England, her mother's home. Lucy cannot bear the thought of leaving Lahardane, their country house with its beautiful land and nearby beach, and a dog she has befriended. On the day before they are to leave, Lucy runs away, hoping to convince her parents to stay. Instead, she sets off a series of tragic misunderstandings that affect all of Lahardane's inhabitants for the rest of their lives.

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.

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 choose 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.

This collection of 12 beautifully rendered tales is an elegant, heartbreaking book about men and women and their missed opportunities. A "New York Times" Notable Book.

The beloved and acclaimed William Trevor's last ten stories, six of which have never been published.
With a career that spanned more than half a century, William Trevor was regarded as one of the greatest writers of short stories in the English language. Now, in Last Stories, the admired master storyteller delivers ten exquisitely rendered stories that illuminate the human condition which will surely linger with the reader long after closing the book. Subtle yet powerful, Trevor gives readers insights into the lives of ordinary people, from the relationship between a former teacher and student to the tragic past of a former dancer. With the inclusion of six previously unpublished stories, this special collection is a gift to lovers of short stories and Trevor's many readers.

Hailed as "probably the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language" by The New Yorker and "an extraordinarily mellifluous writer, seemingly incapable of composing an ungraceful sentence" by The New York Times Book Review, William Trevor is one of our most elegaic chroniclers of loss.
Set in a provincial Irish town against the backdrop of the Second World War, Nights at the Alexandra is a masterpiece of short fiction. Tracing the reminiscences of a fifty-eight-year-old Irish cinema owner named Harry, the story recounts the years during Harry's adolescence when he forges an unlikely friendship with an ÈmigrÈ couple recently arrived in his small town. Gently imperious yet strikingly beautiful, Frau Messinger, a young British woman married to a much older German, introduces a measure of color into Harry's otherwise black-and-white existence.
Disappointed by his dull family and his stifling boarding school, Harry soaks up Frau Messinger's stories of her youth and indulges her numerous flights of fancy. When Mr. Messinger announces his plans to build the town's first cinema and asks Harry to work its ticket window, Harry for the first time begins to imagine a life of possibility rather than privation. But the young man's newfound sense of himself comes not without its price, as William Trevor masterfully limns the border between innocence and experience, creating a subtle portrait of an adolescent moment that has the power to shape an entire lifetime.

William Trevor's astonishing range as a writer--his humor, subtlety, and compassionate grasp of human behavior--is fully demonstrated in these two short novels. In Reading Turgenev, a lonely country girl escapes her loveless marriage in the arms of a bookish young man. In My House in Umbria, a former madam befriends the other survivors of a terrorist bombing with surprising results. Nominated for the Booker Award.

An incredible collection of stories on the human condition by the master artist and humorist William Trevor. In these twelve selections from a rich career, themes such as the suffocating compromises made for perceived gain, the poverty of life without love, and the casualties of bereavement are visited with superb craftsmanship. (1999)

The sixth volume in our popular Very Christmas series, this collection transports readers to the Emerald Isle with stories and poems sure to bring holiday cheer. This anthology is packed with beloved classics, forgotten treasures, and modern masterpieces. You’ll find wondrous works by James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Elizabeth Bowen, Anne Enright, William Trevor, Colm Tóibín, Bernard MacLaverty and many more. See how Christmas is done in snowy Dublin and on the mean streets of Belfast, from west coast to east, and even across sea and ocean to Irish communities in London and New York City. Put a flickering candle in the window and a steaming dinner on the table, and celebrate the Irish way—Nollaig Shona Daoibh—and Merry Christmas!

William Trevor’s stunning new collection of stories displays this renowned craftsman at the peak of his powers. A middle-aged couple meet in a theatre bar for a squalid blind date; a disappointed priest fears an innocent young girl may run away from home; two self-certain sisters visit a newly widowed local woman. From these slender moments Trevor creates whole lives, conjuring up characters marked by bitterness and loss. William Trevor’s graceful prose is a wonder in itself, and as convincing when inhabiting the mind of a school lunchmaid, an adulterous Irish country librarian or a murderer on the London streets. And as is always the case with William Trevor, venom and tragedy are never far from the still surface of the stories.

These stories, many of which first appeared in The New Yorker, are small masterpieces of observation from one of the most highly acclaimed and beloved writers of the century.