Fiction

This collection of stories from Irish master William Trevor is so finely wrought, delivered with such confidence and grace, that even their most shocking consequences possess the inevitability of truth unfolding. In his unerring tales of redemption and regret, Trevor can deliver a glimpse of all Ireland through one simple dilemma: a man protecting his dementia-ridden wife, a broken soul facing the cruelties of his past. But because Trevor's fatalism is always trumped by his humanity, even the darkest of these stories can be consoling. His is a moral sensibility even larger than the world of sorrows he assumes.

—Gail Caldwell / Globe Staff

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