Two Lives: Reading Turgenev & My House in Umbria - Softcover

Trevor, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141044616 ISBN 13: 9780141044613

Publisher: Penguin, 2010

Synopsis

Two Lives: Reading Turgenev & My House in Umbria - two novels by William Trevor

'Evocative and haunting. Trevor writes like an angel, but is determined to wring your heart' Daily Mail

'Marvellous, superb. As rich and moving as anything I have read in years. When I reach the end . . . I wanted to start right again at the beginning' Guardian

In Reading Turgenev an Irish country girl is trapped in a loveless marriage with an older man, but finds release through secret meetings with a man who shares her passion for Russian novels.

My House in Umbria tells of Emily Delahunty, a writer of romantic novels, who helps the survivors of a bomb attack on a train to convalesce, inventing colourful pasts for her patients.

Two novels, two women who retreat further into the realm of the imagination until the boundaries between what is real and what is not become blurred . . .

'One of the most beautiful and memorable things Trevor has written' Independent on Sunday

Reading Turgenev was shortlisted for the Booker Prize

About this title

Review:

The two lives of the title are brilliantly illuminated in a pair of short novels, Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria, that exemplify the biting, tragicomic work of this Anglo-Irish master. The first novel is a sorrowful love story, the second a sort of thriller. Each of Trevor's two heroines is trapped in her life, one in Ireland and the other in Italy, and each has some experience of the transformational power of literature, a subject the author knows at first hand. Nobody can break your heart with such laconic precision. To be read with handkerchief in hand.

Review:

As rich and moving as anything I have read in years. When I reached the end of both of these marvellous novels, I wanted to start right again at the beginning (Guardian)

These novels will endure. And in every beautiful sentence there is not a word out of place (Anita Brookner Spectator)

Inquisitive and loving. Trevor's is among the most subtle and sophisticated fiction being written today (New York Review of Books)

A writer at the peak of his powers; it reminds you what good reading is all about (Chicago Sun Times)

Reading Turgenev is one of the most beautiful and memorable things he has written. It stays in your memory -like Turgenev (Independent on Sunday)

He writes like an angel, but is determined to wring your heart. Trevor at his most evocative and haunting (Daily Mail)

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0141044616
• ISBN 13: 9780141044613
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384