Death in Summer - Softcover

Trevor, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 014027720X ISBN 13: 9780140277203

Publisher: Penguin, 1999

Synopsis

There were three unexpected deaths that summer. After Letitia died, her husband decided to bring in his mother-in-law to help with the baby. None of the likely nannies had proved suitable. But one candidate was particularly persistent, and her return to the beautiful house in Essex led inevitably to the other deaths ... William Trevor's new novel is a riveting, haunting story of tragedy striking at the heart of apparent ease.

About this title

Review:

A William Trevor novel offers the pleasures of a world so thoroughly imagined it makes real life seem murky and badly conceived. When, as in Death in Summer or in his previous novel, Felicia's Journey, his subtle vision meets the rigorous pacing of the thriller, the result chills to the bone. Like a mystery, Death in Summer begins with one premature demise and ends with another; in between, however, Trevor explores the darkest corners of the human heart with a subtlety and compassion rarely seen in works of suspense.

Handsome Thaddeus Davenant has just buried his young, wildly generous wife Letitia--a rescuer of stray dogs and a champion of street drunks. In contrast, Thaddeus is a kind of emotional cripple, scarred by a childhood spent lonely and unloved in his ancestral Quincunx House. He married Letitia for her money, as is immediately clear. Yet he would have loved her, if he had been able, and after their child is born he feels for the first time "possessed by an affection he had been unable to feel for anyone since his own infancy". When Letitia dies, the victim of a freak accident, and none of the nannies interviewed prove suitable, her mother moves in to care for the baby. Mrs Iveson has always considered Thaddeus "shoddy goods", and their détente only gradually thaws into something resembling warmth. Meanwhile, Pettie, one of the rejected nannies, has "taken a shine" to Thaddeus--with increasingly ominous portents.

Pettie inhabits a world far removed from the genteel decay of Quincunx House. Reared in the nightmarish Morning Star home, where the only affection was the creepy kind dispensed by her "Sunday uncle", Pettie is poor, broken, and pathologically starved of love. Trevor chronicles her obsession with Thaddeus in a way that makes clear both Pettie's humanity and her capacity to do serious harm. Still, this is a hopeful book. Grim as Pettie's story may be, she causes stony-hearted Thaddeus to feel the first stirrings of human sympathy, "as the warmth of blood might miraculously seep into a shadow, or anesthesia be lifted by a jolt." Throughout William Trevor's long and feted career, his subject has been nothing less than the problem of evil, and in Death in Summer, he makes a convincing case for its origins in the absence of love. --Mary Park

Review:

"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 Times Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 014027720X
• ISBN 13: 9780140277203
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224