Elizabeth Alone [Import] [Paperback]

William Trevor (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Panther Books; n.e. edition (1977)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0586044892
• ISBN-13: 978-0586044896
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars never skip a Trevor novel, January 26, 2008

By 

Elvisettey "elvisette" (USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Elizabeth Alone (Paperback)

Trevor's prose, as usual, does not fail to disappoint; his language is one of melancholy, longing, and of a quiet despair. In this novel, though, there is a gleam of hope beneath the dusty debris of the everyday, perhaps precisely because, in the lives of the women featured in this novel, the everyday has been disrupted. Each of the four primary female characters (Elizabeth of the title being the central character) is in the hospital, one trying to see through a successful pregnancy after many failures and the other three having hysterectomies. Each, lying in bed and surrounded by strangers, is forced to look at herself through strangers' eyes, to regard herself and the people in her life in a new light. And in each woman's life, a significant rupture occurs during this time of forced contemplation. Trevor thus puts to us the question: what if we were forced to deal with each crisis, removed from the comfort of the everyday, removed from our everyday perfeceptions not only of others but of our very on selves? It is a fascinating question and one that Trevor probes deeply and gently, exposing each nerve fiber laid raw by these circumstances. In the stripped-down setting of a four-bed hospital room, Trevor asks us to realize what it truly is to reflect on the difficulties, troubles, and disasters of daily life-- when we are stripped bare of the defenses that we are so accustomed to using to buffer raw emotions. Elizabeth Alone is a quiet, yet powerful, work.

3 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Early Trevor Gem, April 4, 2000

By 

Edward Short - See all my reviews

This review is from: Elizabeth Alone (Paperback)

Readers of Trevor's more recent books--Death in Summer, Felicia's Journey, Two Lives, After Rain--will enjoy this earlier novel, which has all the trademark Trevor strengths: economy, wit, good carpentry, and that rare thing, truth.