A Bit on the Side, William Trevor
A Bit on the Side, William Trevor
3 Rating(s)
List: $15.99 | Sale: $11.20
Club: $7.99

A Bit on the Side
Stories

Author: William Trevor

Narrator: Simon Vance, Josephine Bailey

Unabridged: 5 hr 56 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 12/15/2004

Categories: Fiction, Psychological


Synopsis

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.


About William Trevor

William Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork, in 1928 and spent his childhood in provincial Ireland. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin. He is the author of fourteen novels and thirteen collections of short stories, and he has won many prizes. His short stories appeared regularly in the New Yorker, and his Collected Stories was chosen by the editors of the New York Times Book Review as a Best Book of the Year. His novels include Love and Summer, nominated for the Man Booker Prize and selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; The Story of Lucy Gault, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, the Whitbread Fiction Prize, and also selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and Death in Summer, a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book of the Year.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jim on November 07, 2017

Twelve short stories; all good and one masterpiece, the title story kept till the end. “Something was different this morning; on the walk from Chiltern Street she had sensed, for an instant only, that their love affair was not as it had been yesterday.” In the blurbs, one from the New Yorker, in whi......more

Goodreads review by Barbara on August 13, 2019

I have not read a short story collection for a long time. I always felt they were too dark and troubling. However, due to many great reviews of various collections, I thought I'd give them another try. Since I have wanted to read something by Trevor, when I saw this collection I thought why not kill......more

Goodreads review by Fiona on June 17, 2019

I apologise to anyone who is a William Trevor fan profusely! But maybe I wasn't in the right mood for his short stories. I know he is very popular and many people rave about how beautiful and thought-provoking his stories are, but I just found my mind wandering by the time I got just over half way.......more

Goodreads review by Derek on December 01, 2021

This was my first encounter with the author. I was stunned by his mastery of the short story form. I enjoyed every story in the collection and I have a feeling I will be reading everything he wrote sooner or later. Now here’s someone who just might deserve the title of honorary Russian.......more