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    Love and Summer
    Love and Summer
    Love and Summer
    Audiobook5 hours

    Love and Summer

    Written by William Trevor

    Narrated by Jim Norton

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    An author who has received international critical acclaim for his exquisite prose, William Trevor saw his novel The Story of Lucy Gault short-listed for the prestigious Booker Prize. Love and Summer tells the tale of Ellie Dillahan, an orphan entered into a bleak future with the man she wed. As the story unfolds, Ellie's life is thrown into tumult by a fateful encounter with another man. "What other living writer could so regularly follow his own masterpieces . with another and another?"-New York Times Book Review
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMar 26, 2010
    ISBN9781440779909
    Love and Summer
    Author

    William Trevor

    William Trevor KBE was an Irish novelist, playwright, and short story writer. One of the elder statesmen of the Irish literary world, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language.

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    Reviews for Love and Summer

    4/5

    279 ratings31 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A lovely little book, beautifully written. More like an extended short story than a novel, with a lot unsaid but much to think about.
    • 5/5
      The solitary, aimless, Florian Kilderry is on the cusp of selling his family home and abandoning Ireland when he meets Ellie Dillahan. Their mutual attraction is recognized by both, as well as others in the rural town, and yet is delayed in its acknowledgement. As Florian sells and discards pieces of his life, Ellie performs her daily routine on her farm and realizes she loves Florian, but not her husband.Trevor builds such tension that by the time they end up alone for the first time at an abandoned and isolated gatehouse and Florian takes Ellie's bicycle and lays it down beside his the moment is explosive in its understatement.Trevor records detail and action with an unprejudiced eye and it is this steady brick-by-brick construction, combined with his surgical skill with description, that injects the story with emotional potency.
    • 3/5
      The setting for this understated novel is Rathmoye, a small town in the south of Ireland in the middle of the 20th century. Mrs Connulty, whose family owns most of the buildings in town has died, and the townspeople come out to honor her. However, a young visitor, Florian Kilderry, also makes an appearance in the town, as he is there to take photographs of a theatre owned by the Connultys that burned down years ago. He catches the eye of Miss Connulty, the daughter of the deceased matriarch, and he has a brief but electric interaction with Ellie Dillahan, a former orphan who is now married to a farmer whose first wife and young child died in a tragic accident that he was partially responsible for.The Dillahan's marriage is a convenient but loveless one for Ellie, as her husband is good to her, but does not inspire her. She falls passionately in love with Florian, who lives in a neighboring town. He is a directionless underachiever, and is in the process of selling his late parents' home, to move to "Scandinavia" to make a new life for himself.The relationship between Ellie and Florian deepens, and the single, middle-aged Miss Connulty is the only one who perceives the danger of this illicit relationship, as it resembles a tragic experience that she had a young woman. As the date of Florian's departure nears, Ellie falls more deeply in love with him, while realizing that she does not love her husband.For me, Love and Summer was a beautifully written, quiet novel of love and repression in a small town. The intentions and portrayal of two key characters were unclear to me, which made this an incompletely satisfying, though still very enjoyable, read
    • 5/5
      What a beautiful emotional story. It begins with the death of a woman who was an important personage to the little town, since she cared for everyone, but somehow I feel that she was doing all the work of respecting and pleasing her family. Her son, who was always mothered by her, is nothing without her. He lives up to his obligations, but he does not care about his fellow man. Her daughter takes over the household and continues the B & B. She has a past that she recognizes by watching a young farmer's wife and a bon vivant, who by chance come to know each other and have a summer flirtation. There's an old confused man everyone appreciates, but not many take him seriously.This story is written with great love for the protagonists. One feels their desires, fears and affections.
    • 4/5
      My wish would be to say that this was just a lovely book and character study by Irish author William Trevor. But lovely isn't quite the right word - there's bits of darkness and sadness in here of the story of a number of people whose lives interlace. The detailed descriptions of things in here ARE lovely, and some readers might find themselves bored with it if they were looking for an action novel. I was rather enchanted with all the descriptive detail and really drawn into the story of these people's lives. There were a couple of times I had a bit of difficulty with following the dialogue and not knowing who was speaking or what exactly they were saying. A small part of this I am sure is the "Irish" manner of speaking that the author employs, where I would think a word or two was missing from the sentence and wondering if it was a typo error that slipped through. But some of it is just that a conversation wasn't written clearly enough for me. Something I rarely encounter. Despite a few stumbles here and there I loved this book. This was published in 2009 and seems to be set around 1960 or so in a small town in Ireland. In the author's words the story begins "On a June evening some years after the middle of the last century ..." This is a very slow paced story with a lot of detail. What is it about? Among other things it is about first love experienced by an already married young woman.
    • 3/5
      Slow start but then u find out who are the main characters and read about the side stories and the heartbreak. Very atmospheric.
    • 4/5
      I have always wanted to read a book by William Trevor, an Irish writer of great renown. This book which is 5 years old is his most recent. His prose is sparse and elegant and the story about small town Ireland in the 60's does a great job of capturing the feel of the time and place. The story which brings 2 people together for a summer connection does a great job through his excellent prose of getting into the characters so that you feel who they are and where they came from. It is a small story which may move too slowly for those that are looking for "action" but I thoroughly enjoyed it and was glad to finally read a book by one of the great writers of the last 50 years.
    • 2/5
      Way, way too slow for me. Trevor is obviously a brilliant writer, but the slow pace and drawn out descriptions just made me crazy.
    • 5/5
      And summer’s lease hath all too short a date… - William ShakespeareWilliam Trevor is, without a doubt, a painter in words. His latest novel, Love and Summer (2009), amply speaks to his ability to capture human joy and heartache in prose that never loses its artistic intensity. Trevor has the peculiar ability to depict quiet, unobtrusive lives in an interesting, even arresting way. The brushstrokes on his small canvas are never overly-dramatic, but they paint a beautifully-realised, impressionistic watercolour of 20th-century Irish life.In Love and Summer, a stranger, Florian Kilderry, arrives in the small town of Rathmoye. He catches the eye of Ellie, a young woman who grew up in a convent, but who is now married to an older farmer, Dillahan. Ellie and Florian’s relationship begins innocently enough, but it quickly becomes more serious as the long summer days stretch out ahead of them. Ellie and Florian are careful to avoid the scrutiny of the Rathmoye townsfolk, but will they be able to keep their relationship a secret? And what happens when Florian has to leave Ireland at the end of the summer?Trevor answers both these questions, but not with the expected results. He is much too skilled a writer to go for clichéd plot points. And if the story sounds familiar and simplistic, don’t believe that for a moment. Trevor constantly serves up unexpected human dramas, without making them gratuitous or melodramatic. His delicate touch can be seen in the way he carefully withholds some information, only to reveal it later to devastating effect.All of his characters are beautifully human – they feel “real”, without having unnecessary tics and quirks to lend them verisimilitude. Ellie and Florian’s love story is quite typical, but magical for all that. And farmer Dillahan’s own tragic past lends his situation a rare poignancy: Ellie’s choice between him and Florian will eventually rest on her reconciling her conscience with her decision. I won’t say any more about it, but I thought Trevor handled it brilliantly.I cannot really fault Love and Summer. It reminded me a lot of Thomas Hardy’s novels, though it is perhaps a bit of a less ambitious and more quiet book. But it does what it does so beautifully and realistically, that I was deeply moved and impressed. Trevor is definitely “the ultimate Old Master”, as one of the blurbs on the book claims.
    • 4/5
      This was another enjoyable novel from William Trevor. It was an easy read, sad at times since most of the characters had tragedy in their lives. I found both the main and supporting characters to be memorable. They were down-to-earth, hard-working, small-town residents who all seemed to accept their lives in a small Irish village. We slowly got to know them as the novel progresses.We all have choices to make in life, some are easy and some are very difficult. Mr. Trevor does a great job of bringing out this point. As he tells this story, he lets us read between-the-lines and use our imagination at times. This novel gave me lots to think about.
    • 4/5
      Initially I wasn't too enthusiastic about this book, one of the readings in my local library's book club. The title spoke to me something like 'cheese romance novel.' Even my daughter, who is back home from India waiting to start school in the Fall, made a snide comment about my reading habits! However, as I started reading I realized that it was a different kind of novel. The beginning has a totally unexpected twist. Even though the plot is not unusual, Trevor carries it out magnificently. Unlike most modern novels where selfishness and immoral pleasures win the day, in this novel it's duty and responsibility the ones who win. Further, I found it very refreshing to read a book void of four-letter words, foul language and pornographic scenes. I contrast this novel to Franzen's The Corrections or Freedom, both hailed as the Great American Novel by critics at the NYT or Esquire, where the preponderance of foul language made me wonder about Franzen's ability to write without resorting to shocking language, that after a while ceased to be shocking.
    • 2/5
      "Love and summer" is an ordinary story of common people set in the Ireland of the fifties, when women weren't able to choose and lives were spent working and doing your duty without thinking too much about what could have been.Ellie is a young married woman, whose husband is a farmer, a widower much older than she. He is a good person, he treats her alright, meaning he doesn't abuse her. After having tried for some years to have children and not being able to, Ellie has accepted her fate and she is sort of contented with her ordinary life in the farm.Everything changes when she meets a young photographer, Florian, with whom she falls in love almost at first sight. As the illicit affair develops, and she gets more and more tangled, Florian continues with his own plans of abandoning Ireland for good, wanting to leave his past and Ellie behind.A sad and unromantic story, a cross of paths which don't leave track, lacking chemistry and imagination. The dialogues were rather dull and slow and the characters were only described on the surface, I felt as I didn't know them well enough to judge.The book fell too short from my expectations, I wouldn't recommend it as a good reading, not even for a boring Sunday evening.
    • 4/5
      This review contains spoilers.I read this quickly after finishing my first book by Trevor, his previous novel "The Story of Lucy Gault" (2002). While I didn't find "Love and Summer" to be as spectacular, it was still wonderful, treating many of the themes - the irrevocably of decisions made and unmade, forced conformity to social standards, and institutional decline - with the same sensitivity and honesty.While we usually associate funerals and death with separation, "Love and Summer," William Trevor's fourteenth novel, shows how it can just as easily lead to passionate connections. On the death of Mrs. Eileen Connulty, the young amateur artist Florian Kilderry intends to photograph the funeral procession through the town of Rathmoye. He stops to ask a young woman, Ellie Dillahan, for directions, and they are mutually taken with one another. Ellie, a foundling raised from childhood in a nearby convent, has been taken in as a housekeeper and was eventually married to Mr. Dillahan, a kindly, older, loving farmer with good intentions, but whose slow, regular life fails to satisfy the young Ellie. The death of his first wife and their child in a horrible farm accident also hunts him constantly. During their first encounter, Florian is taken with Ellie's innocence, and she is drawn to him because he stands for something - anything - outside of her small farm and her life of daily routine. Florian idles for much of the book, occupying his parents' house while he waits for a buyer to appear, all the while thinking about his meetings with Ellie and his parents' artistic pasts. Over time, they meet more and begin an affair. He eventually tells her that, after selling the house, he plans to move to Scandinavia. Ms. Connulty, the daughter of the deceased woman whose funeral originally brought Florian and Ellie together, watches what she perceives to be Florian's encroachment on Ellie's life with suspicion. Ms. Connulty and a curious, verbose man by the name of Orpen Wren cast a shadow over the relationship of Ellie and Florian. In the middle of the night, Ellie slips out of the farmhouse to meet Florian on the road to give Florian one last embrace before assuming the only choice she ever really had - to live out the rest of her life with her harmless, unexciting, damaged husband. It may just be the sentimentalist in me, but Trevor captures the poignancies and ambiguities in life with a wonderful tenderness. He can catch those feelings that pass between the quick silences in conversations that we so often look over, and a beautiful way of making even the pedestrian occurrence highly poetic. I already have "Fools of Fortune" and "Death in Summer," two of his other novels, and very much look forward to reading and reviewing them soon. For those new to Trevor, I recommend "The Story of Lucy Gault," his second-to-last novel, and probably the best work of fiction that I've read in the last year.
    • 4/5
      This is the first I've ready any of William Trevor's writing. I will be reading more. This story of love, loss, relationships, and imagination is sparely written with volumes left between the lines. I am still astounded at how an author can intimately capture and convey a small town like Rathmoye, the the relationships between brother and sister, husband and wife, and even strangers to town with so few words in a plot driven story.
    • 3/5
      William Trevor is a magician of the ordinary. In this novel, the sleepy town of Rathmoye is thrown into a tizzy by the arrival of a young stranger wielding a camera. Nobody knows who he is, but there is plenty of speculation among the local busybodies, especially when his attention appears to focus on Ellie Dillihan--a young woman married to a local farmer much older than herself. The truth is that Florian Kilderry--the young man in question--and Ellie do form a bond. They are of an age and share similar dreams. But they are also hopelessly bound by personal circumstances that will, in the end, keep them apart. Trevor describes a world in which fate turns on a glance and people unquestioningly accept the hand they're dealt. This brief story--pared to its emotional essentials, as delicate as spun glass--is both a joy and a revelation.
    • 3/5
      A quick read. Trevor knows how to write slender stories about ordinary people who do or don't fall in love. He sets them in appealing British settings. Diverting, even engaging, but not great, either. Yet, I find I've read all of them that I've come across.
    • 5/5
      I don't like to give that 5th star very often - this is the first "5 star" novel that I've read this year. But from my perspective, William Trevor deserves the highest accolade for absolutely "getting" the time and place of his tender love story: rural Ireland around 1960. Here he skillfully delineates one of the classic "Trevorian tropes": the decaying Anglo-Irish gentry and their ruined "great house". There's also the sweet, pure Irish lass who is the embodiment of traditional love. Maybe if you've never read him before, this shouldn't be your first William Trevor novel. But if you have, you can be certain that in "Love and Summer" you will find the wistful wry humor and the seriously fine prose style that has made him one of the best Irish writers of our times.
    • 4/5
      This was a quiet story of the inhabitants of the small farming village of Rathmoye in Southern Ireland during an unspecified time that I assumed was the 1950s. Trevor takes us inside the lives of a number of the residents many of whom are haunted by their pasts. The main story is of the somewhat one-sided love affair of Ellie, a married woman, and Florian, a careless single man who is just passing through on the way to the next stage of his life. One of the things I loved about the book was how the author seamlessly weaves the stories of the other characters into this love affair.Trevor’s writing is beautiful and often poetic. Alot is left unsaid with the reader needing to fill in the blanks. I read this for a book group and about half of the participants didn’t like the book and had trouble getting engaged with it. They felt it was too insubstantial and probably should have been a short story. I thought it was very well done and was impressed with how the author conveyed a depth to the characters and the story with very few words. Recommended.A favorite quote: "Almost everything sounded wrong as soon as he said it and for a moment he felt that he belonged in his own created world of predators, that he was himself a variation of their cruelty. He had taken what there was to take, had exorcized, again, his nagging ghost. And doing so, in spite of tenderness, in spite of affection for a girl he hardly knew, he had made a hell for her."
    • 5/5
      I'm going to make a partial and what will seem a strange comparison with Dylan Thomas's 'Under Milkwood'. Strange, as Trevor's work is a novel, Thomas's a play; the first is set in Ireland, the second in Wales; Trevor's story plays out under sunshine, Thomas's largely in the bible-black of night; strange, above all, as 'Under Milkwood' is essentially comic, 'Love and Summer' elegiac, tender and sad. But bear with me.Both communities are tiny backwaters, where it sometimes appears that everyone knows everyone's habits and business, even seem privy to their inner lives, but it is not really so, for wrong assumptions are made, secret affairs carry on, thoughts and emotions, even at their most intense, can remain unrevealed or at least unarticulated.There are seeming philanderers in both works - No Good Boyo and Florian Kilderry - who have hidden depths. There are apparent fools - Willy Nilly and Orpen Wren - who carry gossip and messages that both elucidate and confuse. 'Under Milkwood' has Polly Garter, whom everyone knows as a tart, who has heartfelt compassion and a tender capacity for love; in 'Love and Summer' the apparently guileless Ellie conducts an affair behind her husband's back, yet never loses her essential innocence or our sympathy. At the centre of the Rathmoye community is Miss Connulty who at first seems to compare in her bossiness and aggrandisement with Milkwood's Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, but who we come to see by the end of the novel rather like Captain Cat, seeing more in his blindness than other sighted characters, and with real understanding and empathy for the 'fallen' Polly/Ellie.I don't mean to carry the comparison any further, and of course the style of the two works is radically different, as is the effect they have on us, but I felt the association throughout my reading of this superb offering by one of our greatest living story-tellers, and I wanted to share it with others.
    • 4/5
      William Trevor's novels never disappoint me - there's always something to enjoy, quite apart from his excellent prose style. As with most of his other novels this one is set in rural Ireland, a small community, a misplaced love, and an atmosphere of gentle melancholy. Love is generally accompanied by disappointment.Dillahan is a farmer who lost in his wife and child in an accident. He needs help with the farm so his sisters approach the nuns to find a suitable girl. They choose Ellie who had grown up in the 'foundling home'. She goes to the farm gladly enough as it offers a way out into the wider world. Ellie knows nothing of farming or of men but she adjusts. Dillahan is a very subdued, undemonstrative man, but they get used to each other and eventually marry.At a funeral in the village one day Ellie happens to talk with a young man - Florian Kilderry - dark, handsome, interesting, talkative - and for the first time in her life Ellie experiences the warmth of human love and feels desire - and with it guilt! Florian is in the process of selling his family house and planning to leave Rathmoye. He's interested in Ellie and likes her but he's clearly not about to stick around. It's just a summer flirtation for him, but Ellie is thinking seriously about going with him. She's also torn by the realization that her stolid, loyal husband would be devastated by her departure.After finishing the book I found myself thinking quite a bit about Dillahan, although he's not one of the main characters. He's experienced loss and grief, he's not an exciting husband but he's not insensitive or unkind and his love for Ellie is evident if seldom expressed.
    • 3/5
      While Trevor has crafted a story of some emotional depth here, it left me unsatisfied, and I'm not sure exactly why. It may be in part that the characters all have a strong measure of reserve about them; I never really felt that I knew them very well, or even that they would allow themselves to any kind of inner emotional lives. Ellie seems to have drifted through her life until she falls for Florian; her character is defined mainly by the phrase "I don't mind." This makes what Ellie seems to believe is love but Florian refers to as "friendship" awkward and passive (and even a bit irritating). There are other characters in the novel as well about whom I would have liked to know more (Ellie's husband, the Connulties, Orpen Wren, etc.), but they, too, come off as distant or just strange. Perhaps this is the atmosphere Trevor wanted to convey: a place so overpowered by tradition and constrained by secrets that no one feels comfortable revealing an inner life of any kind. The result is a kind of flatness, and the novel, while well written, didn't leave much of an impression on me in the end.
    • 4/5
      Beatuifully written as you would expect from William Trevor. This book quietly evokes small-town Ireland but isn't one to try if you are looking for lots of drama. Worth reading though.
    • 4/5
      I read this book as the second of two Trevor books, with an excellent first novel by Sophie Townsend in between (Misconceptions). It's interesting to compare a beginning novelist with William Trevor, who received an award for a lifetime of writing achievement in 2009. Both authors draw upon the environment in which the book is set to give a richness and verisimilitude. In Townsend's book the familiarity of the Sydney area she described made me feel that I could imagine bumping into her character on a walk. On the other hand, I've never been, and am never likely to go to Ireland, but Trevor's description of the people and their society and the urban and rural landscape made me feel that I knew it as well as my home city. Without sentimentalizing, Trevor was even able to make me feel an affection for his Ireland.As I've said before, Trevor has a way of setting a mood that I find in few others. I'm not smart enough to figure out how he does it, but it seems to me he does it pretty well. His characters' experiences, however, although set in a particular geographic location, can be readily seen to have a certain universality which speaks to us about the state of modern western human societies.
    • 4/5
      Beautifully written story of love and the choices it requires - to hold on, to let go. The Connulty family opens the story and they are always in the background, representing the propriety of the village - judging from the outside. The enigma of the story is Orpen Wren, displaced from his life's work of cataloging a private library. He veers into madness and fantasy, yet affects many in Rathmoye.
    • 4/5
      Do you recall the story of King Solomon and the baby, wanted by two women who each claimed to be its mother? King Solomon, of course, threatened to cut the baby in half, giving one half to each woman. By threatening this, he could see the reaction of each woman and know who the real mother was, for what mother could stand by and watch her child slaughtered? This is the type of story for which William Trevor is gloriously known, not because Trevor has the wisdom of Solomon but, rather, because his forte is telling stories with no easy answers and with very difficult choices. The heartbreaking “Lucy Gault” was just such a story and so is his recently longlisted 2009 Booker Prize nominee, “Love and Summer.” Set in Ireland in the late 1950’s Trevor tells the story of Ellie Dillahan, whose marriage of convenience is just not working that well for her, and Florian Kilderry, a young photographer who is preparing to leave Ireland, and his thorny memories, behind forever. They meet one summer when Kilderry returns to sell his deceased parents’ home before moving to Scandinavia. Ellie notices him taking photographs at the funeral of a venerable town resident. They both stand out to the other residents, he because they don’t know who he is or why he would be photographing a funeral, and her because they like to oversee the orphan who married a man with a tragedy in his not too distant past. And they both ride bicycles. A lot.It’s what Trevor is able to do with a simple story, written in spare prose, that is always such a delight. His sentences are finely crafted and you find yourself hanging on every word. When the summer is coming to a close and Ellie realizes that Florian will soon be leaving, Trevor gives us this on page 136:“He would go and that he was gone would be her first thought every morning, as her first thought now was that he was here. She would open her eyes and see the pink-washed walls as she saw them now, the sacred pictures above the empty grate, her clothes on the chair in the window. He would be gone, as the dead are gone, and that would be there all day, in the kitchen and in the yard, when she brought in anthracite for the “Rayburn,” when she scalded the churns, while she fed the hens and stacked the turf…It would be there while she lay down beside her husband she had married, and while she made his food and cut his bread, and while the old-time music played.” Twists, turns, holding your breath because you know what will happen…and then no, that’s not it…it’ll happen this way…oops…wait…no, I think this is it. Well, you get the idea. The last 50 pages have you reeling. Love, loss, grief, loyalty. Highly recommended.
    • 3/5
      Story of a few characters in a small Irish town, all of whom are in some way haunted by their past. Ellie, an orphan, sent from the orphanage as a young woman to be a "governess" for a widower whom she ends up marrying. One might say they have a loveless marriage, but it's based on the need for companionship. In the end, we see Ellie's respect for her husband and compassion for his suffering that prevents her from leaving. Or does she subconsciouly intuit that Florian had indeed been her husband's previous wife's lover? Florian is back in town only to sell his family home, a home in which he has always felt inadequate. Wren, the town "fool" who seems to be hallucinating and speaking nonsense, is the bearer of the truth. Definitely character driven. Trevor moves along very slowly taking us into the mind of each of the main characters: each of them a deceptively simple person, but Trevor makes us understand that they each have complex, subtle thought processes, motivations and desires. A good read, but not for someone who likes action! Real sense of place. I liked it very much, but I've read other books by Trevor that I prefer.
    • 4/5
      Love and Summer is very short, but you will definitely find yourself thinking about it after you've finished it. The book is set in a small Irish town called Rathmoye, and the action takes place in one summer, when a stranger, Florian Kilderry, comes to town and catches the eye of a local woman, Ellie Dillahan. Ellie was raised by nuns, and sent to her husband's farm as a housekeeper when she was old enough to go to work. Dillahan suffered an incredible tragedy; then later, married Ellie more for the sake of having someone around to help him on the farm. Kilderry has lived in the shadow of his parents' greatness all of his life, and with their deaths, has decided to leave Ireland for good to start a new life. Ellie and Florian begin a love affair, and Ellie begins planning for a new life as well. But alas. Love and Summer is a novel about love and pain; it is also a story about loneliness and loss. It is told in a very muted and understated tone, and one of the joys of this novel is the author's ability to deliver mundane details about life in a small town without it ever becoming boring. His characterizations are excellent -- there's Miss Connulty, who runs a B&B with her brother and who understands firsthand Ellie's predicament; there's Orpen Wren, who served as the keeper of a family library on an estate which has long since burned to the ground, and who has seen enough in his lifetime to make him become a bit unhinged, and there's Dillihan, the farmer and Ellie's husband, who remains largely mute about his own tragedy. The lives of these characters tend to parallel the main story, each in their own way, and reflect a great deal of the emotional turmoil of the main characters.Love and Summer is a fine novel, and continues Trevor's tradition of excellence in writing. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who has previously read anything by this author. At the end of the day, it becomes much more than a story about love and loss -- and it is well worth reading for the author's understanding of the frailty of human relationships.
    • 3/5
      This is a simple and quiet story of a summer love between former convent-raised foundling, now farmer’s wife Ellie Dillahan and bicycle-riding, quasi-photographer Florian Kilderry. Their affair develops quite innocently but affects several characters quite profoundly. Florian Kilderry has cycled into the quiet town of Rathmoye to photograph the remains of an old cinema and encounters the funeral of old Mrs. Connulty where Ellie happens to see him. Immediately Ellie feels something she realizes she’s never felt in her semi-arranged marriage. She vows not to speak to Florian again but cannot resist when next they meet. Meanwhile sharp-eyed Miss Connulty, now released from the shadow of her domineering mother, sees Florian and Ellie together and immediate recognizes the connection between the two. She worries for Ellie and remembers her fate after a disastrous youthful encounter of her own. We also hear from Orpen Wren as he rambles on almost incoherently about the family and estate where he used to work. When he sees Florian he mistakes him for someone from the past and this prompts him to make a visit to Dillahan’s farm. The visit brings to the fore guilt and pain regarding the death of his first wife and child that Dillahan has struggled hard to suppress.Trevor mixes the quotidian with the emotional, detailing with equal skill Dillahan’s farm chores, Ellie’s discovery of love, and Florian’s acceptance that he has not inherited his parents’ artistic talents.This is own of those novels that, due to the subtly of the writing, has a quiet and lingering impact.
    • 4/5
      This is the first book by William Trevor that I have ever read. I feel a bit embarrassed to confess this because when I read the fly cover and saw how many he has written, I feel as if I have been hiding in a dark hole for a very long time !! There's a very nice photo of him by Lord Snowdon on the back fly cover. He looks just like the kind of gent you'd like to meet on a cold afternoon in a warm and cosy pub in Ireland. Only he lives in Devon now I believe. He has been nominated for the Booker prize no less than four times!The story is very gentle and easy to read. Trevor manages to capture the ordinary everyday stuff of our lives that makes us who we are without boring us to death. The setting for the story is probably what would seem a picturesque village in Ireland to Aussie tourists, but possibly stifling for some of its inhabitants. The characters, whose trials and tribulations we follow, are each afflicted with their own private misfortune. The opening scene is Mrs Connulty's funeral.Her adult children - a brother and sister - inherit the estate and some would say now own half the town. Miss Connulty looks after the bed and breakfast for travelling salesman (down to cleaning their shoes) whilst her brother looks after the other businesses. It is an uneasy relationship. Mr Connulty Jnr was his mother’s favourite and Miss Connulty had a fall from grace in her youth . Miss Connulty takes a vigorous interest in the possible threat to the reputation of a local farmer's wife - Ellie Dillahan. She is concerned that Ellie is being pursued by a passing photographer, Florian Kilderry. She entreats her brother to send Florian on his way but is unsuccessful in garnering his support.Ellie's public misfortune is to be born a foundling. Cared for by nuns in a nearby village she is considered fortunate to gain a position as the housekeeper for a farmer recently bereaved when his wife and child died in a tragic accident. After a number of years she becomes his second wife but they are not blessed with children. As Miss Connulty feared, she falls in love with Florian.And you’ll have to read the rest to find out what choices are made…..!
    • 4/5
      Trevor's newest novel is Longlisted for this year's Booker Prize, and like fellow nominee The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds, Love and Summer is beautifully written but lacking in meaning.The jacket blurb describes the plot as a passionate love affair between Ellie, a woman in a marriage of convenience, and Florian, a failure of a man who is leaving Ireland to start over. All of this takes place in a small Irish town in the 1950s.Somehow though, I really don't think this is what Trevor is writing about. This slim 212 page novel is mainly filled with the internal thoughts - often mentally unstable ones - of the townsfolk, most of whom are underdrawn characters. The sub-plots are barely there, and while they show hints of paralleling the main story, the lack of depth means that they are just unnecessary. Ellie's love for Florian is difficult to understand, as he may be the most infuriating character I have encountered this year. Beyond all this though, there is Trevor's writing - which is exceptional. His ability to place the reader in a character's mind, to detail the confusion of emotions, the random nature of thoughts, is what makes Love and Summer worthwhile. Even though the story and characters drove me crazy, the writing kept me interested.