Death in Summer

Trevor, William; Prebble, Simon

ISBN 10: 0788746308 ISBN 13: 9780788746307

Publisher: Recorded Books, 1998

Synopsis

There were three deaths that summer. The first was Letitia's, sudden and quite unexpected, leaving her husband Thaddeus haunted by the details of her last afternoon, a drizzling Thursday in June. They had spent it arguing in their comfortable house in the country until Thaddeus reluctantly promised to visit a woman from his past - a promise he had no intention of keeping. The next death came some weeks later, after Thaddeus's mother-in-law had helped him to interview the young woman who had answered their advertisement for a nanny to look after Letitia's baby. None was suitable - least of all the last one, with her small, sharp features, her shabby clothes that reeked of cigarettes, her badly typed references - so Letitia's mother moved in herself. But then, just as the household was beginning to settle down, the last of the nannies suprisingly returned, her unwelcome arrival heralding the third of the summer tragedies. William Trevor's new novel is a sypathetic portrait of the sadness and damage that lies at the heart of some lives - both those that are obviously afflicted and those that appear to be blessed.

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: Recorded Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0788746308
• ISBN 13: 9780788746307
• Binding: Audio Cassette