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Overview
From the winner of the 1999 David Cohen British Literature Prize — the richest literary award in the UK — comes an unforgettably chilling novel, written with the compassion and artistry that define Trevor's fiction.There were three deaths that summer. The first was Letitia's, shocking and sudden, leaving her husband haunted by the details of their last afternoon. No one expected that drizzling Thursday in June to signal the approach of two more tragedies — deaths that shook both the apparently blessed and the obviously afflicted. William Trevor gives us an unputdownable novel, beautifully written and wonderfully sympathetic.
Synopsis
A chilling new novel by the author of Felicia's Journey. After both his wife and mother-in-law die suddenly, Thaddeus's household seems to settle down. But then an unwelcome guest appears, heralding the third and final of the summer tragedies.
LA Times Book Review
Possibly the most perfect of Trevor's novels. . .he is a Balanchine of fiction. . . .The final pages may be the most eloquent and sorrowful passage that Trevor has ever written. Certainly, it is one of the most astonishing.
Editorials
New York Review of Books
Exquisite. . .Redemption isafter allTrevor's theme and he has never shrunk from showing that it is not the rich and beautiful who will pass through the eye of the needle but the poor and the plain to whom the kingdom of heaven belongs.Dan Cryer
Like a good mystery, Death in Summer is a tease, coyly nudging readers away from what's really about to happen. But since its author is William Trevor, the renowned Anglo-Irish master of both story and novel, the book is a lot more -- a stark rendering of English class divisions and a compelling dramatization of sudden, violent eruptions in the lives of those too timid to venture beyond tidy safe harbors.
At the heart of this novel and Felicia's Journey, Trevor's previous one, are young women of little education and lesser means struggling to make their way in an indifferent world. Early on, we understood that Felicia was a doomed victim. Pettie of Death in Summer, a shoplifting runaway from a squalid orphanage, seems too cunning, energetic and resourceful for that fate. But now she's out of a job and the rent is overdue. Maybe she can land that nanny job out in the Essex countryside at Quincunx House, where Thaddeus Davenant's wife has just died, leaving behind a baby daughter.
It's too bad Pettie isn't allowed to tell this story. Though Trevor does shift back and forth between her and Thaddeus, it's this pale, tight-lipped trimmer who gets most of the attention. Thaddeus does have a certain understated edge; while still single, he once carried on with a married woman, and his match with the plain but well-to-do Letitia Iveson underscored a quietly creepy deviousness. But instead of sliding into iniquity, the melancholy Thaddeus only tends his garden.
To nearly every other character, Trevor gives a bracing humanity. Maidment is the nosy butler, rummaging through rooms and rumors like a gossip columnist. Albert is Pettie's worrywart pal, a young man with a big heart and endless curiosity. Dot Ferry is Thaddeus' conniving and pathetic former lover. Only Thaddeus' mother-in-law, Mrs. Iveson, seems more of an idea of upper-crust respectability than a fully fleshed-out human being.
Above all, what makes these characters interesting, even the tepid Thaddeus, is the author's foreboding Olympian vision. The great god Inertia rules all. Upstairs or downstairs, these contemporary Britons seem to shuffle along, ever prey to overwhelming, unseen forces. Bad things happen to good people, all right, but Trevor is eager to underscore the vulnerability of everyone, good or bad. Letitia's death (in a cycling accident) is but the first of several.
In very different ways, Pettie and Thaddeus are strangers to love. Pettie has suffered the mind-warping manipulations of a child molester. Thaddeus never had much of a father, never opened himself to love's vulnerability. Patiently, quietly, Trevor nudges these two toward the inevitable collision. The tension is palpable, the insight into character shrewd, the prose slyly seductive. -- Salon
NY Times Book Review
William Trevor is an extraordinarily mellifluous writer, seemingly incapable of composing an ungraceful sentence.Wall Street Journal
Trevor creates an atmosphere hushed with foreboding and informed by regret.NY Review of Books
Exquisite. . .Redemption is, after all, Trevor's theme and he has never shrunk from showing that it is not the rich and beautiful who will pass through the eye of the needle but the poor and the plain to whom the kingdom of heaven belongs.Boston Sunday Globe
Chillingly reminiscent of Felicia's Journey. . .vintage Trevor.Esquire
Bleakly beautiful. . .Trevor is one of the most compassionate, generous, and large-hearted writers alive.LA Times Book Review
Possibly the most perfect of Trevor's novels. . .he is a Balanchine of fiction. . . .The final pages may be the most eloquent and sorrowful passage that Trevor has ever written. Certainly, it is one of the most astonishing.Time
Remarkable artistry. . .for all the wit and charm of Death in Summer, horror stories don't get much more hair-raising than this.Library Journal
Master storyteller Trevor's (After Rain, LJ 9/15/96) new novel is a suspenseful portrait of a tragic death and the consequences it brings. After the sudden death of his wife, Thaddeus Davenant must make arrangements for the care of his baby daughter. His mother-in-law, Mrs. Iveson, guides him as he advertises and interviews for a nanny. When a suitable candidate can't be found, Mrs. Iveson offers to fill the role herself. Another death and the escalating intrusions of Pettie, one of the rejected applicants, shatter the quiet life they have started to rebuild, forcing permanent changes. Trevor draws his characters using subtle lines, letting the reader see inside their minds to convey their troubled psychological depths. Another winner from Trevor. -- Dianna Moeller--Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
USA Today
Death in Summer takes on a sense of foreboding that Hitchcock would have admired. Few writers can capture the essence of a mood or offer psychological insight as well as Trevor.Kirkus Reviews
One of the masters of contemporary fiction, Trevor (After Rain, 1996.) keeps his typically level head as he quietly records two worlds in collision. Though on the surface it portrays a conflict of class, this straightforward novel also captures with equanimity the delusional world of the downtrodden and the emotionally stunted lives of the genteel rich. Trevor's tight-lipped Englishman, Thaddeus Davenant, comes into his wealth through his loveless marriage to Letitia Iveson, a spinsterish librarian who admires Thaddeus' attachment to his decaying family estate, and who, at story's outset, dies in a bicycle accident. She leaves behind a six-month-old baby, Georgina, who elicits from the usually distrustful Thaddeus a love and devotion such as he's shown no female before. All his passion has been spent on the tattered grandeur of Quincunx House, the family estate preserved by Thaddeus' Polish mother, even after the family fortunes declined.And once Thaddeus reluctantly agrees to allow his mother-in-law (and former enemy) to join them at Quincunx, trouble begins—not with her, but with one of the rejected nannies interviewed beforehand, an orphan girl named Pettie, who quickly develops an elaborate fantasy life involving the grieving widower and his darling child. Trevor suggests character with the ease of a single gesture or detail, and his narrative instincts are, as usual, dead-on, providing just enough melodramatic intrigue to propel his studies in interior life.