Synopsis
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.At the heart of this stunning collection is Trevor's characteristic tenderness and unflinching eye for both the humanizing and dehumanizing aspects of modern urban and rural life.
The New York Times - Lynn Freed
In A Bit on the Side, his 11th collection of short stories, Trevor delivers his classic dramatis personae -- a stalker, a cad, a cuckolded husband, a retarded girl, a thwarted artist, a bitter widow, among others. Theirs are lives altered by what Trevor calls ''the fragility of love.'' It is a phrase that, in one way or another, seems to give shape and form to the collection. Love is shifting and unreliable, bleak in its absence, delicate in memory, enduring to no purpose.