books in order

William Trevor Books In Order

Novels

  1. A Standard of Behaviour (1958)
  2. The Old Boys (1964)
  3. The Boarding-House (1965)
  4. The Love Department (1966)
  5. Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel (1969)
  6. Miss Gomez and the Brethren (1971)
  7. Last Lunch of the Season (1973)
  8. Elizabeth Alone (1973)
  9. The Children of Dynmouth (1976)
  10. Old School Ties (1976)
  11. Other People’s Worlds (1980)
  12. Fools of Fortune (1983)
  13. Nights at the Alexandra (1987)
  14. The Silence in the Garden (1988)
  15. Reading Turgenev (1991)
  16. Juliet’s Story (1991)
  17. Felicia’s Journey (1994)
  18. Death in Summer (1998)
  19. The Story of Lucy Gault (2002)
  20. My House in Umbria (2003)
  21. Love and Summer (2009)

Omnibus

  1. Two Lives (1991)
  2. Three Early Novels (1997)

Collections

  1. The Day We Got Drunk on Cake (1967)
  2. The Ballroom of Romance (1972)
  3. Angels at the Ritz (1975)
  4. The Distant Past (1977)
  5. Lovers of Their Time (1978)
  6. Beyond the Pale (1981)
  7. Ireland (1984)
  8. The News from Ireland (1986)
  9. The Collected Stories (1989)
  10. Family Sins (1989)
  11. Deadly Sins (1994)
  12. Outside Ireland (1995)
  13. Marrying Damian (1995)
  14. Co*cktails at Doney’s (1996)
  15. After Rain (1996)
  16. Fanfare (1999)
  17. The Hill Bachelors (2000)
  18. A Bit on the Side (2004)
  19. The Dressmaker’s Child (2005)
  20. Cheating at Canasta (2007)
  21. Selected Stories (2010)
  22. The Mark-2 Wife (2011)
  23. Last Stories (2018)

Plays

  1. Girl (1968)
  2. Going Home (1972)
  3. Night with Mrs. Da Tanka (1972)
  4. Marriages (1973)

Anthologies edited

  1. The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories (1989)

Non fiction

  1. A Writer’s Ireland (1984)
  2. Excursions in the Real World (1993)

Novels Book Covers

Omnibus Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Plays Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

William Trevor Books Overview

The Old Boys

The little world of a public school, with its grudges and rivalries, reaches out into the little world of the aged, as The Old Boys grimly battle over the post of President of the Association.

The Love Department

Lady Dolores ran the offices of The Love Department, resolving the heartaches of the wives of Wimbledon. Now her protege was sent on a mission to learn the secrets of Septimus and to stop him in his tracks. Septimus was irresistible to women. Many had succumbed to his charm and more had died of it.

Miss Gomez and the Brethren

Miss Gomez, a recent convert to the local church, has a feeling that a terrible sex crime will soon take place on Crow Street and warns the residents of that area, yet no one listens to her predictions until a young girl goes missing.’

The Children of Dynmouth

A small, pretty seaside town is harshly exposed by a young boy’s curiosity. His prudent interest, oddly motivated, leaves few people unaffected and the consequences cannot be ignored.

Fools of Fortune

Penguin Classics is proud to welcome William Trevor ‘Ireland’s answer to Chekhov’ The Boston Globe and ‘one of the best writers of our era’ The Washington Post to our distinguished list of literary masters. In this award winning novel, an informer s body is found on the estate of a wealthy Irish family shortly after the First World War, and an appalling cycle of revenge is set in motion. Led by a zealous sergeant, the Black and Tans set fire to the family home, and only young Willie and his mother escape alive. Fatherless, Willie grows into manhood while his alcoholic mother s bitter resentment festers. And though he finds love, Willie is unable to leave the terrible injuries of the past behind. First time in Penguin Classics Winner of the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award

Nights at the Alexandra

Hailed as ‘probably the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language’ by The New Yorker and ‘an extraordinarily mellifluous writer, seemingly incapable of composing an ungraceful sentence’ by The New York Times Book Review, William Trevor is one of our most elegaic chroniclers of loss. Set in a provincial Irish town against the backdrop of the Second World War, Nights at the Alexandra is a masterpiece of short fiction. Tracing the reminiscences of a fifty eight year old Irish cinema owner named Harry, the story recounts the years during Harry’s adolescence when he forges an unlikely friendship with an migr couple recently arrived in his small town. Gently imperious yet strikingly beautiful, Frau Messinger, a young British woman married to a much older German, introduces a measure of color into Harry’s otherwise black and white existence. Disappointed by his dull family and his stifling boarding school, Harry soaks up Frau Messinger’s stories of her youth and indulges her numerous flights of fancy. When Mr. Messinger announces his plans to build the town’s first cinema and asks Harry to work its ticket window, Harry for the first time begins to imagine a life of possibility rather than privation. But the young man’s newfound sense of himself comes not without its price, as William Trevor masterfully limns the border between innocence and experience, creating a subtle portrait of an adolescent moment that has the power to shape an entire lifetime.

The Silence in the Garden

What is a promise? What are the consequences of the act of promising? In this bold yet subtle meditation, the author contemplates the seductive promise of speech and the seductive promise of love. Imagining an encounter between Moli re’s Don Juan and J. L. Austin, between a mythical figure of the French classical theater and a twentieth century philosopher, she explores the relation between speech and the erotic, using a literary text as the ground for a telling encounter between philosophy, linguistics, and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. In the years since the publication of this book which the author today calls the boldest, the most provocative, but also the most playful she has written, speech act theory has continued to play a central and defining role in the theories of sexuality, gender, performance studies, post colonial studies, and cultural studies. This book remains topical as readers increasingly discover how multiply relevant the speaking body is. Moving beyond the domain of formal linguistic analysis to address these questions, the author has written a daring and seductive book.

Felicia’s Journey

‘You’re beautiful,’ Johnny told her and so, full of hope, seventeen year old Felicia crosses the Irish Sea to England to find her lover and tell him she is pregnant. Desperately searching for Johnny in the bleak post industrial Midlands, she is, instead, found by Mr Hilditch, a strange and lonely man, a collector and befriender of homeless young girls…
William Trevor’s tightly woven psychological thriller won the 1994 Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award. Susan Hill described it as, ‘A masterpiece. You read and are dazzled. It has one of the most memorable and convincing, most sinister and terrifying of characters created in the modern novel.’

Death in Summer

In a dark and atmospheric novel, three tragedies strike one man’s household during a stormy summer in the country.

The Story of Lucy Gault

William Trevor has long been acknowledged as one of the most extraordinary writers of our time, with a particular insight into the workings of the human heart. In The Story of Lucy Gault, he has surpassed himself. The Gault family leads a life of privilege in early 1920s Ireland, but the threat of arson leads nine year old Lucy’s parents to leave Ireland for England, her mother’s home. Lucy cannot bear the thought of leaving Lahardane, their country house with its beautiful land and nearby beach, and a dog she has befriended. On the day before they are due to leave, Lucy runs away, hoping to convince her parents to stay, but instead she sets off a series of tragic misunderstandings that affect all of the inhabitants of Lahardane and the perpetrators of the failed arson attack for the rest of their lives. In this brilliant, profound and moving story of love, guilt and forgiveness, Trevor has written a novel that stands alongside the best literature in the English language.

My House in Umbria

Mrs. Emily Delahunty a mysterious and not entirely trustworthy former madam quietly runs a pensione in the Italian countryside and writes romance novels while she muses on her checkered past. Then one day her world is changed forever as the train she is riding in is blown up by terrorists. Taken to a local hospital to recuperate, she befriends the other survivors an elderly English general, an American child, and a German boy and takes them all to convalesce at her villa, with unforeseen results.

Love and Summer

It’s summer and nothing much is happening in Rathmoye. So it doesn’t go unnoticed when a dark haired stranger appears on his bicycle and begins photographing the mourners at Mrs. Connulty’s funeral. Florian Kilderry couldn’t know that the Connultys are said to own half the town: he has only come to Rathmoye to photograph the scorched remains of its burnt out cinema. A few miles out in the country, Dillahan, a farmer and a decent man, has married again: Ellie is the young convent girl who came to work for him when he was widowed. Ellie leads a quiet, routine life, often alone while Dillahan runs the farm. Florian is planning to leave Ireland and start over. Ellie is settled in her new role as Dillahan’s wife. But Florian’s visit to Rathmoye introduces him to Ellie, and a dangerously reckless attachment begins. In a characteristically masterly way Trevor evokes the passions and frustrations felt by Ellie and Florian, and by the people of a small Irish town during one long summer.

Two Lives

Two beautiful, memorable novels in one volume, both focussing on women who retreat into their imaginations until the boundaries between what is real and what is not become blurred. In ‘Reading Turgenev’, which was shortlisted for the 1991 Booker Prize, an Irish country girl is trapped in a loveless marriage with an older man. But she finds unusual solace in secret meetings with a man who shares her passion for Russian novels…
The second story, ‘My House in Umbria’ tells how romantic novelist Emily Delahunty helps the survivors of a bomb attack on a train and invents colourful pasts for her convalescent patients.

Three Early Novels

In one volume for the first time, three of William Trevor’s early novels that established his name as a master of the genre. In The Old Boys, a group of septuagenarians revive schoolboy conflicts in the election of the President of the Association. In The Boarding House, Mr Bird takes in boarders whom society would never miss if it ever noticed they were around. Then he makes a fatal mistake: he dies. From the offices of The Love Department, Lady Dolores cures the heartaches of the lonely wives of Wimbledon with inimitable flourish and finesse.

The Ballroom of Romance

William Trevor’s second book of short stories proves once again that he is the master of the art. CONTENTS Access To The Children Nice Say At School The Ballroom of Romance The Forty Seventh Saturday A Happy Family Going Home An Evening With John Joe Dempsey The Mark 2 Wife The Grass Widows A Choice Of Butchers Kinkies O Fat White Woman

Ireland

William Trevor has long been hailed as one of the greatest living writers of short fiction. These nineteen stories selected by Trevor himself from The Collected Stories and After Rain capture the nuances of rural and middle class life in the Ireland he knows so well. Here are its people, their lives driven by love, faith, and duty, surviving in a culture that blends tradition with transformation. In spare and eloquent prose Trevor’s stories engage and provoke us as only the best fiction can.

The News from Ireland

A collection of short stories by the author of ‘The Silence in the Garden’, ‘Nights at the Alexandra’, ‘Juliet’s Story’, ‘Fools of Fortune’, ‘Two Lives’ and ‘The Old Boys’.

The Collected Stories

William Trevor is one of the renowned figures in contemporary literature, described as ‘the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language’ by the ‘New Yorker’ and acclaimed for his haunting and profound insights into the human heart. Here is the ultimate collection of his short fiction, with dozens of tales spanning his career and ranging from the moving to the macabre, the humorous to the haunting. From the penetrating ‘Memories of Youghal’ to the bittersweet ‘Bodily Secrets’ and the elegiac ‘Two More Gallants’, here are masterpieces of insight, depth, drama and humanity, acutely rendered by a modern master.

Family Sins

In Family Sins , William Trevor brings his tremendous empathy and keen eye for detail to these gemlike tales of country life in Ireland. Here are twelve portraits of everyday folded in crisis haunted by memory, battered by circumstance. The middle aged women in The Printmaker and August Saturday are consumed by fleeting, long ago affairs; the young boy in Children of the Headmaster is terrified by the disappointments and awful mysteries of impending adulthood; and Events at Drimaghleen hinges on a gruesome murder suicide. Whether grim, poignant, or shot through with flashes of subtle humour, Family Sins displays the deft characterization and precise, involving prose that readers the world over have come to expect from William Trevor. Praise for William Trevor: To be a master of the short story and a master of the novel is a distinction achieved by precious few writers, but such a master is William Trevor. The Washington Post Book World William Trevor may well be the best writer of short fiction in the English language. The London Free Press Trevor is a master storyteller, a skilled spinner of affecting, compassionate tales. The Edmonton Journal

Co*cktails at Doney’s

This is a collection of short stories by William Trevor. Some are humorous stories of Irish lives. Others deal with a world elsewhere, often Italy, but the characters often have difficult, bewildering lives. In 1977, Trevor was awarded an honorary Commander of the British Empire.

After Rain

This is a remarkable collection of twelve new stories, mostly set in Ireland, which was greeted with universal acclamation when published in hardcover in 1996. The title story is a small, sad masterpiece, about a woman holidaying alone in an Italian hotel. ‘A dazzling collection of short stories’ ‘Sunday Times’.

Fanfare

An anthology of stories with musical themes initially broadcast on BBC Radio 3 by contemporary authors who include William Boyd, Rose Tremain, Penelope Fitzgerald, Christopher Hope and John Mortimer.

The Hill Bachelors

‘One of the very best writers of our era.’ The Washington Post Book World 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.

A Bit on the Side

Playaway is the easiest way to listen to a book on the go. An all in one format, the player and content are combined in one 2 ounce unit and it comes with everything you need to start listening immediately. No separate player needed, no CDs, no downloads just press play! ‘William Trevor is truly a Chekhov for our age, and a new collection of stories from him is always a cause for celebration. These twelve stories include: The waiter who divulges his shocking life of crime to his ex wife. A woman repeats the story of her parents’ unstable marriage after a horrible tragedy. The schoolgirl who regrets gossiping about the cuckolded man who tutors her. A middle aged couple meet in a theatre bar for a squalid blind date. The disappointed priest who fears an innocent young girl may run away from home. Two self certain sisters visit a newly widowed local woman. And, in the volume’s title story, a middle age accountant offers his reasons for ending a love affair. From these slender moments Trevor creates whole lives, conjuring up characters marked by bitterness and loss. William Trevor’s graceful prose is a wonder in itself, and as convincing when inhabiting the mind of a school lunchmaid, an adulterous Irish country librarian or a murderer on the London streets. And as is always the case with William Trevor, venom and tragedy are never far from the still surface of the stories. At the heart of this stunning collection is Trevor’s characteristic tenderness and unflinching eye for both the humanizing and dehumanizing aspects of modern urban and rural life.’

Cheating at Canasta

The publication of a new book by William Trevor is a great literary event. Trevor’s last collection, A Bit on the Side, was named a New York Times Notable Book and hailed as one of the Best Books of the Year by papers from coast to coast, including The Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle. And his earlier collection, After Rain, published in 1996, was named one of the eight best books of the year by The New York Times. Trevor s precise and unflinching insights into the hearts and lives of ordinary people are evidenced once again in this stunning new collection. From a chance encounter between two childhood friends to the memories of a newly widowed man to a family grappling with the sale of their ancestral land, Trevor examines with grace and skill the tenuous bonds of our relationships, the strengths that hold us together, and the truths that threaten to separate us. Subtle yet powerful, his stories linger with the reader long after the words have been put away. BR These twelve exquisitely nuanced tales of regret, deception, adultery, aging, and forgiveness confirm Trevor s reputation as a master of the form and one of literature s preeminent chroniclers of the human condition.

Selected Stories

A marvelous collection from ‘the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language’ The New Yorker. Four time winner of the O. Henry Prize, three time winner of the Whitbread Prize, and five time finalist for the Man Booker Prize, William Trevor is one of the most acclaimed authors of our time. Over a career spanning more than half a century, Trevor has crafted exquisitely rendered tales that brilliantly illuminate the human condition. Bringing together forty eight stories from After Rain, The Hill Bachelors, A Bit on the Side, and Cheating at Canasta, this second volume of Trevor’s collected fiction offers readers ‘treasures of gorgeous writing, brilliant dialogue, and unforgettable lives’ The New York Times Book Review.

The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories

What began simply in Ireland as entertainment and communication through the spoken word soon grew into an extraordinary literary form unmatched in any other country. The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories triumphantly demonstrates the development of the short story in Ireland from the early folk tales of the oral tradition here translated from the Irish to the writing of Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce. William Trevor, himself a distinguished short story writer, brings a special sensibility and awareness to his role as editor as he presents stories by Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Bowen, Liam O’Flaherty and such modern rising stars as Edna O’Brian, Desmond Hogan, and Joyce Cary. This wide ranging collection of forty five stories will certainly serve to entertain and enrich our understanding of this unique literary genre.

Excursions in the Real World

A modern master of the short story brings his precise and compassionate observations to bear on his own life, in a book of recollections that is at once funny, poignant, and revealing an eloquent book in which Trevor turns memory into a balancing act between truthfulness and art. Illustrations.

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