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Overview
His first collection since the bestselling After Rain, William Trevor's The Hill Bachelors is a heartbreaking book about men and women and their missed opportunities: four people live in a suburban house, frozen in a conspiracy of silence that prevents love's consummation; a nine-year-old dreams that a part in a movie will heal her fragmented family life; a brother and sister forge a new life amid the chaos of Ireland after the Rebellion; and in the title story, a young man chooses between his longtime love and a life of solitude on the family farm. These beautifully rendered tales reveal Trevor's compassion for the human condition and confirm once again his position as one of the premier writers of the short story.
Synopsis
From the pre-eminent author of Felicia’s Journey and Death in Summer, the first major collection of stories since the highly acclaimed After Rain.
With understatement and startling precision William Trevor writes about longing and sadness, the loving and the lonely, those who barely have control over their lives and those who have something to hide. Whether writing of the dying of a day, a love or a way of life, Trevor tells a story of such distilled beauty and intelligence that humanity illuminates even its darkest corners. Eloquent, subtle and brilliantly crafted, The Hill Bachelors will hold a beloved place amongst William Trevor’s award-winning body of work and shows the master of short stories at the height of his game.
San Diego Union
...Trevor astounds with his spare and graceful writing, and his insight into the hearts of his varied characters...
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Irish writer William Trevor has been applauded as the greatest practitioner of the short story in the English language. In his latest collection, The Hill Bachelors, a range of characters -- from rural Irish farmers to American expatriates to stuffy English elitists -- face painstaking choices, missed opportunities, and seemingly minor events that dramatically affect the course of their lives. Each of these 12 stories is a moving and emotional exploration of the difficulties of modern life.San Diego Union
...Trevor astounds with his spare and graceful writing, and his insight into the hearts of his varied characters...Commonweal
...support[s]...the growing consensus that William Trevor is one of the very best writers of short stories alive.Raleigh News & Observer
Trevor portrays his characters with dignity and without sentimentality - whatever their circumstances.From The Critics
The twelve stories in Trevor's stunning collection explore the quiet lives of characters caught between desire and circumstance. In the title story, a son must choose between marrying his longtime love or caring for his widowed mother and the family farm, while another tale finds a man and a woman reaching for each other with small, guarded gestures, knowing if they ever touched, the relationship would dissolve. By turns haunting and humorous, these are beautifully crafted stories, written in forthright prose. The author adores his characters and imbues them with wit, strength and heart, yet he repeatedly refuses sentimentality and tidy reconciliations. Set throughout the Irish countryside, Trevor's stories contrast his characters' emotional struggles with Ireland's harsh, sprawling beauty, offering readers a collection both gorgeous and heart-rending, seamlessly paced and defiantly hopeful.—Bret Anthony Johnston
Publishers Weekly -
With the recent death of V.S. Pritchett, Trevor is arguably the best short story writer working in the English language, and these stories are up to his own highest standards. Trevor simply knows so much, moving effortlessly between Irish rural settings, like that of the title story, and the world of the sophisticated English art historians at the heart of " A Friend in the Trade." He is equally able to inhabit the worlds of priests, restless American expatriates and quarrelsome academics, always with an acute sense of their wide range of voices and habits of mind. His effects are quiet but no less telling for that, and his understated endings are achieved with mastery. One of the best of an outstanding bunch is "The Mourning," the story of a simple Irish laborer who nearly gets to plant a bomb in London for the IRA, until he thinks better of it; the subtle way he is drawn into thinking he can perform such a desperate act says more about the Troubles than many a full-length novel. "Good News" is a heartrending account of a young girl hoping a minor film role will help bring her family together. "The Telephone Game" is a psychologically astute study of an about-to-be-married young couple who come perilously close to finding out too much about each other at the last moment. "The Virgin's Gift" is an utter change of pace, an intensely poetic story of faith and redemption that reads like a myth. "Against the Odds" is a delicious study of a woman who is a confidence trickster against her own better instincts. "Of the Cloth" is a penetrating tale of the impact a small act of kindness has over the years. Work like this reveals a perfectly crafted story as one of the true gems of literature. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.Library Journal
This is the newest short story collection from prolific Irish writer Trevor. Each of the 12 stories is a carefully crafted exploration of how a single act or event can alter a life's course. In several of the stories, loss and yearning prevail, and yet the collection as a whole is not bleak, for many of Trevor's characters are redeemed by small acts of personal courage. In "Of the Cloth," a Church of Ireland priest, living in an isolated and declining rural parish, discovers "the task he'd been given" and comes to find solace in knowing that his act of kindness brought meaning to another's life. In "The Virgin's Gift," a reclusive monk questions the meaning of his faith and the quest he is given only to discover a gift that is greater then any he could previously have imagined. In "The Mourning," Liam Pat is a simple Irish laborer working in England who is taken in by a dubious mentor but finds within himself the personal strength to act on his own best instincts. While the situations that begin some of the stories seem somehow familiar, every story includes a revealing moment that captures the reader's imagination and evokes strong feelings for the characters involved. Highly recommended.--Caroline Hallsworth, Sudbury P.L., Ont. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\Michiko Kakutani
Mr. Trevor manages to work masterful variations on these familiar melodies, demonstrating once again his authority and poise as a storyteller, his Chekhovian understanding of missed connections and misplaced hopes.—New York Times
William Pritchard
...beautifully and economically told...[contains] as fine a moment as any I know in Trevor's fiction...[Trevor] has grown less interested in creating victims so as to score points off them. His literary art has become exploratory, rather than clinically diagnostic or satiric, and in so doing it has become more generous toward his characters.—New York Times Book Review