Book description
After Rain - Twelve remarkable stories by the master
storyteller William Trevor
'There is no better short story writer in the English-speaking
world' Wall Street Journal
In this collection of twelve dazzling, acutely rendered tales,
William Trevor plumbs the depths of the human heart. Here we encounter
a blind piano tuner whose wonderful memories of his first wife are
cruelly distorted by his second; a woman in a difficult marriage who
must choose between her indignant husband and her closest friend; two
children, survivors of divorce, who mimic their parents' melodramas;
and a heartbroken woman traveling alone in Italy who experiences an
epiphany while studying a forgotten artist's Annunciation.
Trevor is, in his own words, 'a storyteller. My fiction may, now and
again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not
consciously set out to do so.' Conscious or not, he touches us in ways
that few writers even dare to try.
If you enjoyed The Story of Lucy Gault and Love and
Summer, you will love this book. It will also be adored by readers
of Colm Toibin, George Saunders and James Joyce.
William Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork. He has written
eighteen novels and novellas, and hundreds of short stories, for which
he has won a number of prizes including the Hawthornden Prize, the
Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award, the Whitbread Book of the Year
Award and the David Cohen Literature Prize in recognition of a
lifetime's literary achievement. In 2002 he was knighted for his
services to literature. His books in Penguin are: After Rain; A Bit
on the Side; Bodily Secrets; Cheating at Canasta; The Children of
Dynmouth; The Collected Stories (Volumes One and Two); Death
in Summer; Felicia's Journey; Fools of Fortune; The Hill Bachelors;
Love and Summer; The Mark-2 Wife; Selected Stories; The Story of
Lucy Gault and Two Lives.
William Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork, and spent
his childhood in provincial Ireland. He studied at Trinity College,
Dublin.
He has written many novels and won many prizes, including the
Hawthornden Prize, the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award,
and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. His most recent novel,
The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), was shortlisted for both the
Man Booker Prize and the Whitbread Fiction Prize.
He is a celebrated short-story writer, and his two most recent
collections are The Hill Bachelors (2000), which won the
Macmillan Silver Pen Award and the Irish Times Literature
Prize, and A Bit on the Side (2004). Both are available in
Penguin, as is his Collected Stories.
