Last Stories: William Trevor - Softcover

Trevor, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 024133778X ISBN 13: 9780241337783

Publisher: Penguin, 2019

Synopsis

'What a writer he was; he could flip over a sentence so gently, and showthe underbelly in a heartbeat. His work is always quietly compassionate' Elizabeth Strout

In this final collection of ten exquisite, perceptive and profound stories, William Trevor probes into the depths of the human spirit. Here we encounter a tutor and his pupil, whose lives are thrown into turmoil when they meet again years later; a young girl who discovers the mother she believed dead is alive and well; and a piano-teacher who accepts her pupil's theft in exchange for his beautiful music. These gorgeous stories - the last that Trevor wrote before his death - affirm his place as one of the world's greatest storytellers.

'Trevor is a master of both language and storytelling' Hilary Mantel

'He is one of the great short-story writers, at his best the equal of Chekhov' John Banville

'The greatest living writer of short stories in the English language' New Yorker

About this title

Review:

None but those with a complete mastery of fiction can walk this line. William Trevor was not "an Irish Chekhov" or even "the Irish Chekhov". He was and will remain the Irish William Trevor (Guardian)

10 stories bring a literary career that lasted more than half a century to a consummate conclusion (Sunday Times)

William Trevor's prose runs as clear as water yet tastes like gin (Economist)

Extraordinary stories from ordinary lives (The Times)

One of the great contemporary chroniclers of the human condition, in all its pathos, comedy and strangeness. As a writer he looked at the world with an always surprised but never scandalised eye, and his writer's heart was with those awkward and obscurely damaged souls who cannot quite manage the business of everyday life - all of us, that is (New Statesman)

There are those rare, exceptional writers who are fortunate enough (like their readers) to burn bright and steady over many decades, expressing the same creative clarity at the end of their careers as they did at the beginning. William Trevor was one of those writers (LA Times)

We honor him as the supreme master of his honest art (Cynthia Ozick)

In the first few paragraphs of a story he could set an entire scene without seeming to, working on details, small moments, odd thoughts. As in the work of Alice Munro, there often seemed to be very little happening in his fiction, but then he was capable of offering the reader a sense of an immense drama

His stories are formally beautiful and, at the same time, interested in the smallness of human lives. He was, as a writer, watchful, unsentimental, alert to frailty and malice. A master craftsman

Trevor is a master of both language and storytelling

About the Author:

William Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland, in 1928. He is the author of fourteen much-lauded novels: he won the Whitbread Prize three times and was short-listed for the Booker Prize four times. Trevor was widely recognized to be one of the greatest short-story writers in the English language. In 1999 William Trevor received the prestigious David Cohen Literature Prize in recognition of a lifetime's literary achievement, and in 2002 he was awarded an honorary knighthood for his services to literature. He died in 2016.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 024133778X
• ISBN 13: 9780241337783
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224