Both characters are cautious yet, in their dreams, daring neither understands the stakes of the romantic game they play, and neither is practiced at love. They meet by accident in the small Irish town of Rathmoye in the mid-1950s the two are drawn to each other, and their shy secretive courtship comprises the bulk of the book. The principal figures here are Ellie Dillahan, an orphan from the hill country married to an older farmer, and Florian Kilderry, a half-Italian photographer preparing to leave his inherited home. Now, with “Love and Summer,” his gift of empathetic attention to the lives of “little” people remains on full display. When “The Collected Stories” appeared in 1993, its 1,200 pages seemed a kind of summing up indefatigably, however, this octogenarian continues on an almost-annual basis to advance his art.īorn in Mitchelstown, County Cork, in 1928, Trevor spent his childhood in provincial Ireland and draws much of his material from that region still. Such novels as “Felicia’s Journey” and, most recently, “The Story of Lucy Gault” manage to be both claustrophobic and expansive, both lyrical and macabre - a combination he has made his own since “The Old Boys” (1964) and “The Children of Dynmouth” (1976). Trevor has published 14 novels and 12 collections of short stories as well as plays, works of nonfiction and the novellas “Nights at the Alexandra” and “Two Lives” (which contains the incandescent “Reading Turgenev” and “My House in Umbria”). Surely his absence from the list of laureates has more to do with the politics of national identity than a clear-eyed assessment of merit no author writing in English today can claim a more extensive or accomplished body of prose.

That William Trevor has not yet received the Nobel Prize in Literature strikes me as a shame.

Reading turgenev by william trevor