Death in Summer (Thorndike Core) [Large Print] [Hardcover]

William Trevor (Author)

Book Description

Series: Thorndike Core | Publication Date: February 1999

Handsome Thaddeus Davenant has just buried his young, wildly generous wife Letitia--a rescuer of stray dogs and a champion of street drunks. In contrast, Thaddeus is a kind of emotional cripple, scarred by a childhood spent lonely and unloved in his ancestral Quincunx House. He married Letitia for her money, as is immediately clear. Yet he would have loved her, if he had been able, and after their child is born he feels for the first time "possessed by an affection he had been unable to feel for anyone since his own infancy." When Letitia dies, victim of a freak accident, and none of the nannies interviewed prove suitable, her mother moves in to care for the baby. Mrs. Iveson has always considered Thaddeus "shoddy goods," and their détente only gradually thaws into something resembling warmth. Meanwhile, Pettie, one of the rejected nannies, has "taken a shine" to Thaddeus--with increasingly ominous results.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A William Trevor novel offers the pleasures of a world so thoroughly imagined it makes real life seem murky and badly conceived. When, as in Death in Summer or in his previous novel, Felicia's Journey, his subtle vision meets the rigorous pacing of the thriller, the result chills to the bone. Like a mystery, Death in Summer begins with one premature demise and ends with another; in between, however, Trevor explores the darkest corners of the human heart with a subtlety and compassion rarely seen in works of suspense.

Handsome Thaddeus Davenant has just buried his young, wildly generous wife Letitia--a rescuer of stray dogs and a champion of street drunks. In contrast, Thaddeus is a kind of emotional cripple, scarred by a childhood spent lonely and unloved in his ancestral Quincunx House. He married Letitia for her money, as is immediately clear. Yet he would have loved her, if he had been able, and after their child is born he feels for the first time "possessed by an affection he had been unable to feel for anyone since his own infancy." When Letitia dies, victim of a freak accident, and none of the nannies interviewed prove suitable, her mother moves in to care for the baby. Mrs. Iveson has always considered Thaddeus "shoddy goods," and their détente only gradually thaws into something resembling warmth. Meanwhile, Pettie, one of the rejected nannies, has "taken a shine" to Thaddeus--with increasingly ominous results.

Pettie inhabits a world far removed from the genteel decay of Quincunx House. Reared in the nightmarish Morning Star home, where the only affection was the creepy kind dispensed by her "Sunday uncle," Pettie is poor, broken, and pathologically starved for love. Trevor chronicles her obsession with Thaddeus in a way that makes clear both Pettie's humanity and her capacity to do serious harm. Still, this is a hopeful book. Grim as Pettie's story may be, she causes stony-hearted Thaddeus to feel the first stirrings of human sympathy, "as the warmth of blood might miraculously seep into a shadow, or anesthesia be lifted by a jolt...." Throughout William Trevor's long and storied career, his subject has been nothing less than the problem of evil, and in Death in Summer, he makes a convincing case for its origins in the absence of love. --Mary Park --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

A hot, beautiful summer in Essex provides the background for Trevor's latest novel, in which three deaths occur and people from all of England's social classes interact in unexpected ways. Thaddeus Davenant, the penurious descendant of an illustrious family, marries Letitia Iveson for her money but learns to appreciate her gentle goodness. When she dies in a freak accident, he's left with their infant daughter. After his interviews with nanny applicants fail to produce a candidate, his mother-in-law volunteers to move into Quincunx House to care for Georgina. But Thaddeus has unwittingly introduced evil into his household. Devastated when she is not hired as Georgina's nanny, desperate, love-starved Pettie, brought up in a foster home where she was sexually abused, becomes obsessed with the life she imagines she would live with Thaddeus and concocts a plan to remove Mrs. Iveson from the scene. Meanwhile, Thaddeus is forced to come to the aid of his former mistress, a lower-class woman whose illness and death coincide with his other crises. Trevor's insight into human nature and his dexterity in depicting characters from the lower strata of society are again displayed in this mesmerizing story. Pettie, like the heroine of Felicia's Journey (1995), has neither a consoling family nor inner resources to sustain her. The contrasts between Quincunx House and the Morning Star youth home, and between the genteel stoicism of the upper classes and the desperation of those with nothing to lose, are stunningly clear. As usual, Trevor's prose is meticulous and restrained, and surprises resonate after their quiet disclosure. His message?that life is cruel because death is random, but for some, life's cruelty is such that death is a balm?is conveyed with the ease of a master storyteller and humane observer.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 251 pages
• Publisher: Thorndike Press (February 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0783804261
• ISBN-13: 978-0783804262
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,151,677 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

William Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork. He has written many novels, and has won many prizes including the Hawthornden Prize, the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award, and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. His most recent novel Love and Summer was longlisted for the Booker Prize. He is also a renowned short-story writer, and his two-volume Collected Stories was published by Viking Penguin in 2009. In 1999 William Trevor received the prestigious David Cohen Literature Prize in recognition of a lifetime's literary achievement, and in 2002 he was knighted for his services to literature. He now lives in Devon.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Trevor's prose is difficult for some to tolerate,, January 3, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Death in Summer (Hardcover)

but if you are willing to trace the route he uses to arrive at his conclusion, you will be rewarded. Trevor writes impressionistically, describing a slow, backlit reality hung with moody distractions and twice thought memories that are at once sharp and vague. There is a pervasive ambiguity that subtly threatens to coalesce into an all too clear knowledge of the truth.

It takes the entire book to complete the picture of the inhabitants of this broken world. The characters continue to recede before us dropping only crumbs. We have to be willing to gather these crumbs in order to come up with the complete picture, even though we are able to guess at some of the consequences. In all this is a rewarding, if difficult, book to read.

EKW

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Wonder of Words and Moods, January 16, 2002

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Death in Summer (Mass Market Paperback)

Death in Summer is one of the more appropriate titles for a novel I've seen in a while. William Trevor is a gifted writer, one of characteristic styles that are fascinating, illuminating..yet with a dark view of the world that begs for light. The stories of three deaths, bizarrely interrelated in a strange English place, is only a superficial tease of what lies within and beneath this fine novel. The real passings are about the deaths of life views that occur when indescribable losses alter our lives. Trevor has an uncanny ability to vary his vocabulary/tone/philosophical views/visceral descriptions adjusted according to which of his myriad characters is relating a view of the story. Whether the description of a garden is eloquent when from the mind and mouth of the gentrified owners of the mansion where the story takes place, or the interior of a cafe is puncutated with the glassy views of a declining, bosomy "loose woman", or the stagnation of a squalid orphanage is regarded with acceptance by the ne're-do-well young folks of the street - with each of these disparate voices Trevor allows authenticity beyond the abilities of most contemporary authors. At times his stream of conscious style of writing causes the need to retrace pages to make sure where we are, but that is a glory in and of itself. THAT is how submerged the reader becomes when reading this fine book. It has its own life!

23 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Well done, but why bother?, January 23, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Death in Summer (Mass Market Paperback)

Trevor has succeeded in producing a well-written, well-constructed novel about uninteresting characters. Perhaps the book is simply too spare and short. Robert Graves called the verse of D.H. Lawrence "not poems, but rather outlines for poems." DEATH IN SUMMER strikes me as less a novel than the outline for a novel. To win our sympathy, these dry, pale figures would need more flesh, more color, more background. Understatement is sometimes a literary virtue, but here it's exaggerated to the point of dullness.