The Hill Bachelors - Softcover

In more than two dozen books, William Trevor has recounted heartbreaking narratives with an extraordinary economy of detail and expression. The stories collected in The Hill Bachelors are cut from this same understated cloth, and reveal a master at the very height of his powers. As usual, only the merest tip of the emotional iceberg breaks the surface of his prose. Yet Trevor invariably points us toward submerged memories, traumas, and desires, ennobling the ordinary with an often tragic grandeur.

Renunciation--be it personal, political, familial, or erotic--is usually at the core of these tales. In the title story, for example, 29-year-old Paulie returns to work the land of his fathers on a desolate hillside in the west of Ireland, fully aware that he will henceforth be unable to marry: "Enduring, unchanging, the hills had waited for him, claiming one of their own." "A Friend in the Trade" revolves around unrequited love, while the hero of "The Mourning" ultimately rejects the so-called heroism of sectarian violence. Most of The Hill Bachelors is set in Ireland, and boast a richness of imagery and lyrical intensity that verges on prose poetry. "Low Sunday, 1950" in particular evokes the terrible beauty of Yeats's history-haunted landscapes. And in "The Virgin's Gift," a prodigal son makes his long-awaited return, eliciting the closest that William Trevor ever comes to a Joycean epiphany: "No choirs sang, there was no sudden splendor, only limbs racked by toil in a smoky hovel, a hand that blindly searched the air. Yet angels surely held the cobwebs of this mercy, the gift of a son given again." --Robert Mighall

From the pre-eminent author of Felicia?s Journey and Death in Summer, the first major collection of stories since the highly acclaimed After Rain.

With understatement and startling precision William Trevor writes about longing and sadness, the loving and the lonely, those who barely have control over their lives and those who have something to hide. Whether writing of the dying of a day, a love or a way of life, Trevor tells a story of such distilled beauty and intelligence that humanity illuminates even its darkest corners. Eloquent, subtle and brilliantly crafted, The Hill Bachelors will hold a beloved place amongst William Trevor?s award-winning body of work and shows the master of short stories at the height of his game.