Love and Summer by William Trevor

From the Publisher

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.

The New York Times - Thomas Mallon

In book after book, [Trevor] has somehow turned the nondescript and the habitual into the exceptionally vivid and particular…When he wishes, as in his 1994 novel, Felicia's Journey, he can depict the most gruesome violence, but always in the same even tones with which the hens get fed. This new novel, except for the accidents that took Mrs. Connulty's husband and Dillahan's first wife, is a delicate sort of drama—there is no corpse in the basement, no bomb lies hidden in any drawer—but even so, a reader will have his heart in his mouth for the last 50 pages. And when that heart settles back down, it will be broken and satisfied…a thrilling work of art.

The Washington Post - Elizabeth Strout

Everyone, as Trevor knows so well, has a story. No character in this book goes unnoticed; no one is forgotten. For those readers who have loved the generosity and beauty of Trevor's work (he has written 27 books of fiction), Love and Summer will be one more entry into a world that is both heart-breaking and deeply fulfilling.

Publishers Weekly

The tragic consequences of a woman's lost honor and a family's shame haunt several generations in Trevor's masterful 14th novel. His prose precisely nuanced and restrained, Trevor depicts a society beginning to loosen itself from the Church's implacable condemnation of sexual immorality. Years ago, Miss Connulty's dragon of a mother forced her into lifelong atonement after she was abandoned by her lover. Now, in the mid-1950s, middle-aged and forever marked for spinsterhood in her small Irish town, she is intent on protecting Ellie Dillahan, the naïve young wife of an older farmer. A foundling raised by nuns, Ellie was sent to housekeep for the widowed farmer, and she is content until her dormant emotions are awakened by a charming but feckless bachelor, Florian Kilderry, who has plans to soon leave Ireland. Their affair is bittersweet, evoking Florian's regretful knowledge that he will cause heartbreak and Ellie's shy but urgent passion and culminating in a surprising resolution. Trevor renders the fictional town of Rathmoye with the precise detail of a photograph, while his portrait of its inhabitants is more subtle and painterly, suggesting their interwoven secrets, respectful traditions and stoic courtesy. (Sept.)

Library Journal

Trevor's first novel since 2002's Booker-shortlisted The Story of Lucy Gault beautifully reveals the summer love that blooms between Ellie Dillahan, an orphan who has become a farmer's wife, and Florian Kilderry, a bachelor haunted by his muse yet lacking any means of expressing his art. Ellie and Florian meet in Rathmoye, a small Irish town where the influential and tragic Connulty family owns several concerns, including a burned-out cinema and a boarding house. Only Miss Connulty and her brother, Joseph Paul, remain to enact the final scene of their family's drama, into which the young lovers have unwittingly stumbled. Trevor directs his characters to a stunning conclusion that affirms love's sustaining influence even in the midst of heartache and profound disappointment. VERDICT Trevor's latest is rich in dazzling imagery, especially variations on light, illumination, and reflection, and unforgettable characters like Orpen Wren, a potentially senile librarian. This is another masterly work from one of our greatest contemporary novelists. —J. Greg Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman

Kirkus Reviews

The poignancy of life worn down at the elbows, Trevor's signature note, gently animates another masterpiece. Until Florian Kilderry, ineffectual photographer sporting a loud necktie, bicycled into Rathmoye, a town where "nothing happened," Ellie Dillahan never knew she didn't love her husband. "A young Catholic girl from the hills," she's the sort of secretly budding wallflower that Trevor (Cheating at Canasta: Stories, 2007, etc.) typically invests somehow with magic. Ordinary character and circumstance akilter make up his metier, and Rathmoye's chockablock with both: a Joycean funeral, middle-aged siblings sharing telepathy, a centenarian belting IRA songs from his deathbed, a homeless madman hoarding the useless papers of a long-penniless blueblood family. Inside Ellie, quiet foundling darling of the nuns who reared her, burns long-hidden longing. A grateful contentment grounds her marriage to Dillahan, an aging farmer haunted by the deaths of his child and first wife in an accident he feels he caused. But passion? None. So when Florian turns friendly, she imagines this child of artists, reader of Fitzgerald and Dostoevsky, heir to an 18-room manse, as a romantic, exotic deliverer. And he does turn tender, drawn to Ellie's pathos, charm and homespun toughness. The attraction simmers; the pair begin to dream of each other, and village tongues start wagging. But Florian withholds a secret: The mansion's a wreck, he's buried in debt and only a passport away from Ireland will resurrect him. She fantasizes fire and sweetness; he frets about her with kindness and pity. Pulled between duty and beauty, Ellie is terrified that decent, dear Dillahan will detect her, and agonizes that her soul,nurtured by the nuns into vigilant virtue, will be lost. Will she be lost yet worse should she fail to dare?An archetypal Irish love story and a perfect novel-sweet, desperate, sad, unforgettable.

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