Felicia's Journey

Felicia is unmarried, pregnant, and penniless. She steals away from a small Irish town and drifts through the industrial English Midlands, searching for the boyfriend who left her. Instead she meets up with the fat, fiftyish, unfailingly reasonable Mr. Hilditch, who is looking for a new friend to join the five other girls in his Memory Lane. But the strange, sad, terrifying tricks of chance unravel both his and Felicia's delusions in a story that will magnetize fans of Alfred Hitchcock and Ruth Rendell even as it resonates with William Trevor's own "impeccable strength and piercing profundity" (The Washington Post Book World).

For three decades William Trevor has been "one of the best writers at work in our language" (Boston Globe). Now, in a stunning progression, Trevor weds his literary art to hypnotic psychological suspense in a page-turner that will magnetize fans of Hitchcock and of Ruth Rendell at her most laconically chilling.

Full of hope, seventeen-year old Felicia crosses the Irish sea to the English Midlands in search of her lover Johnny to tell him she is pregnant. Unable to find him, alone and desperate, she is found instead by Mr. Hilditch, an obese catering manger, collector and befriender of homeless girls, who is also searching — in a way Felicia could never have imagined...

Publishers Weekly

Trevor, long admired for his trenchant stories and novels, his subtle humor and broad compassion, retains all those virtues in his deeply absorbing new novel and adds a degree of narrative tension he has not shown before. Felicia is a poor, plain, rather simple Irish girl made pregnant by the first boy to bed her, who then promptly disappears to England, leaving no address. When she abandons her taciturn family to look for him, her only thought is to be reunited with a lover. But she meets portly, self-delighted Mr. Hilditch, catering manager at a factory in the grimy English Midlands, who shows her unexpected kindness, even helps arrange an abortion for her; after all, he's been a good friend to so many other lost girls, hasn't he? Wary of him at first, then resigned, finally increasingly anxious as she wonders what became of his other friends, Felicia picks her numb way among psychological minefields. What happens to her and to Mr. Hilditch, in the brilliantly evoked setting of dank cafes and pubs, homeless wanderers, revivalists and bus trips to stately homes, is the stuff of nightmare; not cynically created, but one born of deep understanding and piercing truth. This is a thriller lifted to the level of high art, and it should win Trevor many new admirers. BOMC selection. (Jan.)

Known for moving, haunting novels such as Felicia's Journey and Fools of Fortune, Irish author William Trevor is also known as a master of the short story genre. As the New York Times Book Review noted, Trevor "moves between the short story and the novel; Irish settings and English; the capitalized Troubles of his native land and the personal lowercase ones of his characters." He does so with unwavering skill.