Family Sins - Hardcover

WILLIAM TREVOR was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork, in 1928. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and has spent a great part of his life in Ireland. Since his first novel, The Old Boys, was awarded the Hawthorne Prize in 1964, he has received many honours for his work, including the Royal Society of Literature Award, the allied Irish Banks Prize for Literature, and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. His novel, The Story of Lucy Gault, was shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Whitbread Fiction Prize. Trevor is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters. He has been awarded an Honorary CBE, was made a Companion of Literature, and was knighted for his services to literature. In 1999, Felicia’s Journey was made into an award-winning film by Atom Egoyan. His most recent books are A Bit on the Side and Cheating at Canastas.

Trevor is heir to Elizabeth Bowen as an Irish writer who has mastered the English tradition and heir apparent to V.S. Pritchett as master of the short story. These dozen stories delicately evoke the emotional limits of disciplined lives: "Rewards for decency are not duly handed out." Incidental details of daily existence are for Trevor shaped by family sins of omission, notably absent or distant parents, children, or spouses. These stories extract genuine pathos from the perseverance of ordinary characters in comfortless situations. Trevor does not patronize the unhappy. Of late his milieu is often rural and suburban Ireland, frequently in the late 1940s, and these stories will be especially welcomed by readers of his last collection, The News from Ireland ( LJ 4/1/86), and novel, The Silence in the Garden ( LJ 10/1/88).
- John P. Harrington, Cooper Union, New York
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