Death in Summer [Import] [Paperback]

William Trevor (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Viking; First Edition edition (1998)
• ISBN-10: 0670884995
• ISBN-13: 978-0670884995
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,763,174 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 (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 (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.