The Hill Bachelors - Tapa blanda

The Hill Bachelors - a remarkable collection of stories from the master storyteller William Trevor

'There is no better short story writer in the English-speaking world' The Wall Street Journal

The Hill Bachelors is a stunning meditation on men and women and the heartbreak of missed opportunities: three people are frozen in a conspiracy of silence that prevents love's consummation; a nine-year-old dreams that a movie part will heal her fragmented family life; a brother and sister forge a new life amid the terrible beauty 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 twelve beautifully rendered tales reveal Trevor's unrivalled compassion for the human condition.

'His tight, perfected short stories - each an astonishing performance in which melodramatic situations are turned, by acute psychological insight, into classic drama - make him the greatest living writer in English' Weekly Standard

Readers of The Story of Lucy Gault and Love and Summer will adore The Hill Bachelors. It will also be cherished by readers of Colm Toibin and William Boyd.

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.

'The simpleminded gardener caught in a dark pact with the mistress of the house, the Church of Ireland reverend lost in his unpeopled parish, the predatory child-abuser actor using film-making to trap his girl victims, the absurd bookseller buffoon who secretly adores another man's wife . . . All the stories are intense, menacing in the very ordinariness of their detail . . . at times rising to epiphanies of delicate contact . . . Vintage Trevor'
Evening Standard

'Trevor invites comparison with the great masters of short story. Like Chekhov, he has the power of getting into the skin of ordinary, unspecial, even rather dim people and showing te richness of their inner lives'
Independent on Sunday

'The genius of William Trevor is that he can entice you into his fictional terrain in a handful of pages'
Literary Review

'Beautifully understood . . . a veteran writer at the peak of his powers'
Sunday Times