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The Hill Bachelors [Paperback]

William Trevor (Author)
4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
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Book Description

Publication Date: 5 July 2001

The Hill Bachelors - a remarkable collection of stories from the master storyteller William Trevor

'There is no better short story writer in the English-speaking world' The Wall Street Journal

The Hill Bachelors is a stunning meditation on men and women and the heartbreak of missed opportunities: three people are frozen in a conspiracy of silence that prevents love's consummation; a nine-year-old dreams that a movie part will heal her fragmented family life; a brother and sister forge a new life amid the terrible beauty of Ireland after the Rebellion; and in the title story, a young man chooses between his longtime love and a life of solitude on the family farm. These twelve beautifully rendered tales reveal Trevor's unrivalled compassion for the human condition.

'His tight, perfected short stories - each an astonishing performance in which melodramatic situations are turned, by acute psychological insight, into classic drama - make him the greatest living writer in English' Weekly Standard

Readers of The Story of Lucy Gault and Love and Summer will adore The Hill Bachelors. It will also be cherished by readers of Colm Toibin and William Boyd.

William Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork. He has written eighteen novels and novellas, and hundreds of short stories, for which he has won a number of prizes including the Hawthornden Prize, the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award, the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the David Cohen Literature Prize in recognition of a lifetime's literary achievement. In 2002 he was knighted for his services to literature. His books in Penguin are: After Rain; A Bit on the Side; Bodily Secrets; Cheating at Canasta; The Children of Dynmouth; The Collected Stories (Volumes One and Two); Death in Summer; Felicia's Journey; Fools of Fortune; The Hill Bachelors; Love and Summer; The Mark-2 Wife; Selected Stories; The Story of Lucy Gault and Two Lives.

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Product details

  • Paperback: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin; New Ed edition (5 July 2001)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0140294694
  • ISBN-13: 978-0140294699
  • Product Dimensions: 12.9 x 1.6 x 19.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 49,779 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Amazon Review

William Trevor has established a trademark for beautifully crafted human sketches which depict powerful situations and sentiments with an extraordinary economy of detail and expression. The Hill Bachelors offers 12 such sketches, revealing a master at the very height of his powers. The merest tips of emotional icebergs break the placid surface of his prose. Yet, through gesture, half-formed thought or barely-articulated wish, he indicates the memories, traumas and desires that lie beneath, ennobling the ordinary with an often tragic grandeur. His theme is often "what might have been".

The unrequited love of "A Friend in the Trade", the rejection of heroism in "The Mourning" or the renunciation of personal fulfilment, for familial or even national interests in "The Hill Bachelors" combine to establish pathos as the key tone of the collection. In the title story, 29-year-old Paulie returns to work the land of his fathers on a desolate hillside to the west of Ireland, full-knowing that this means he will never marry: "Enduring, unchanging, the hills had waited for him, claiming one of their own." Many of the stories are set in Ireland, and these have a richness of imagery and lyrical intensity that at times brings them close to prose poems. "Low Sunday, 1950," recalls Yeats' "terrible beauty" in its imagery of a landscape haunted by history; while "The Virgin's Gift" combines descriptive simplicity with religious allegory in a moving tale of a man's return to his parents after 40 years of self-imposed exile. --Robert Mighall --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

William Trevor was born in County Cork in 1928 and spent his childhood in various provincial Irish towns. He went to Trinity College, Dublin and then to England in 1953. He now lives in Devon. In 1977 William Trevor received an honorary CBE in recognition of his services to literature, and in 1998 he was awarded the prestigious David Cohen British Literature Prize for a lifetime's achievement in writing.
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First Sentence
On the steps of the Scheles' house, stained glass on either side of the brown front door, Sidney shakes the rain from his plastic mackintosh, taking it off to do so. Read the first page
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Small perfections 25 July 2007
By Mr. David Cheshire
Format:Paperback
As a short story writer William Trevor displays a complete mastery of form, character, language and setting. These elements are moved around in the manner of a skillful scene-shifter with sometimes one element, sometimes another, coming to the fore. It is the Irish setting in the title story and The Virgin's Gift. Sometimes it's character as in Three People. He can also do unlikely romance, as in the beautiful Against The Odds. Trevor creates perfect miniatures, full of light and detail and meaning.
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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars ELEGANT PROSE - KEEN UNDERSTANDING 30 Oct 2000
By A Customer
Format:Hardcover
Following on the heels of his memorable Death In Summer (1998), the incomparable Irish storyteller, William Trevor, brings us a collection of 12 poignant tales that illuminate the human condition.

Acknowledged by many to be the master of his oeuvre, Trevor commands our attention with dignity and subtlety. Amazingly adept at shifting perspectives from male to female in varying locations and scenes, the author's championship form is again evident in The Hill Bachelors.

His initial offering, "Three People" is an incisive rendering of the toll of fabrication. A trio share a secret too dark for utterance which binds them together yet holds love at bay.

A lonely minister's life is compassionately observed in "Of The Cloth." The Rev. Grattan Fitzmaurice oversees three small churches, "...one of them now unattended, each of them remote, as his rectory was, as his life was." He lives alone in the rectory where "Emptily, all sound came twice because an echo added a pretence of more activity than there was, as if in mercy offering companionship."

Bea, a nine-year-old with long dark hair, in "Good News" hopes that a movie part will heal the rupture in her family, while Clione in "A Friend in the Trade" is a middle-aged woman with whom "Beauty has not finished." She knows what is unspoken and feels only pity for an unrequited love.

Trevor's spare prose shimmers in the summary paragraph of "The Virgin's Gift," as he describes a son's return to his now frail, elderly parents: "No choirs sang, there was no sudden splendour, only limbs racked by toil in a smoky hovel, a hand that blindly searched the air. Yet angels surely held the cobweb of this mercy, the gift of a son given again."

Another story takes place on the eve of a wedding when a game forces a young couple to confront the differences in one another. With "Against The Odds," Trevor displays his gift for knowing the female heart as an older woman rues her past while fearing she has jeopardized a chance for happiness.

Both eloquent and elegant, Trevor's work is meat compared to the broth of some of today's fiction. He continues to astound as he explores the complexities of human relationships with sympathetic candor. The Hill Bachelors is yet another triumph for the most accomplished storyteller of our day.

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Understand a little more, condemn a little less 17 Sep 2009
By Eileen Shaw TOP 1000 REVIEWER
Format:Paperback
These economical stories are often as much about what isn't said as about what happens or is spoken between the protagonists. Whether he is writing about simple country folk (simple in the old sense, that is), or metropolitan elites, he imputes a depth of feeling and sensitivity that seems to effortlessly chime in with people's views of themselves and each other. It is a quality of deep respect for humanity and as such it endows his writing with a deep sense of meaning. You won't catch William Trevor relying on stereotypes for even the smallest of walk-on parts in his dramas of the modern soul.
I say modern, for his stories here are as likely to be set in London, Wales or France, as the backwaters of neglected corners of Ireland which is his usual geographical milieu. They depict what is essential and eternal about good people and they often convey unease about people who may not be so good, while viewing their frailties or transgressions with an understanding eye. He exemplifies the opposite of what John Major so cynically advised, as his writing allows us to understand a little more and condemn a little less.
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