The Story of Lucy Gault [Hardcover]

William Trevor (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Knopf Canada; Reprint edition (2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0676975445
• ISBN-13: 978-0676975444
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (66 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,991,915 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

39 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars When Less Is More, February 9, 2003

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Story of Lucy Gault (Hardcover)

Reading the literature of Willaim Trevor is akin to listening to a string quartet rather than a symphony, to viewing a tiny Vermeer rather than massive Monet, to holding a seashell rather than viewing an aquarium. THE STORY OF LUCY GAULT is a life of enormous experience distilled by Trevor's deft hand into a mere 225 pages. The tale is an epic poem, a thoughtful elegy about love, forgiveness, sacrifice, and enduring kindness. The writing contains the truest scents of Irish language, the tale unfolds with the sweep of a Victorian novel, the emotions elicited are penetrating and piercing, and on many a page there simply cannot be a dry eye - so sensitive and delicate are the human feelings expressed.

Willaim Trevor writes with the clarity and economy of a poet while painting his vivid vistas of Ireland, England, Italy, Switzerland........and the human heart. Here is a book whose story is so fine that it is only on completing the novel that the reader can reflect on what a treasureable journey has been provided. This story is a tragedy of sorts, but as the author writes "Love is greedy when it is starved...Love is beyond all reason when it is starved." The meaning of these lines is for each of us, as readers, to find. Take your time with this book: the rewards are immeasureable.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best of Trevor, October 7, 2002

By 

P. A. Hogan (Providence RI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Story of Lucy Gault (Hardcover)

As in other Trevor stories, "The Story of Lucy Gault" demonstrates the cost of political turmoil in human terms. It is the time of "The Troubles" in Ireland and the Gaults are Protestants in a mainly Catholic country. But to summarize Lucy's story merely will diminish your experience of this exquisitely told somber tale of a series of ill-fated actions: by reckless and impetuous youth and by the well-intentioned. William Trevor, a long-time resident of England but born, bred and forever an Irishman, has described himself as "a God-botherer." "Most of my fiction," he said, "seems to do that. I'm definitely on the side of Christians, but I don't mind where I go to church, whether it's a Catholic church or a Protestant church." This sort of ecumenism pays off here where he plumbs the depths of both Catholic and Protestant characters. "The Story of Lucy Gault", which made the 2002 Booker Prize shortlist, is probably Trevor's finest achievement.

23 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars incredulity reigns, August 4, 2004

By 

C. A Cikra "cacikra" (Hartville, Ohio USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Story of Lucy Gault: A Novel (Paperback)

As many others have said, I too love William Trevor's sparse, elegant style, and the heartache in the first third of the book left a profound impression on me. As the years in the plot passed, however, its utter unreality started to depress me. Real people don't behave in such ways (you don't check up on the old homestead or its loyal retainers, etc., FOR THIRTY YEARS??!!). Did the Gaults never have to pay taxes? Apply for a new passport? Come on. One can see that Trevor tries to address this essential problem by having Captain Gault say he wrote letters home many times but never sent them. He and his wife just live their lives of quiet desperation, so novelistic it becomes self-indulgent bathos. And poor Lucy? To use the parlance of the young, her life sucks, and then it sucks some more. End of novel. I'm sorry, but no matter how beautifully something is written (which this is), it ultimately has to add up to a credible story containing human actions the reader believes are plausible, even in the fictive world created by the author. Lucy's "redemption" in the end doesn't even feel deserved because she never did anything for which to be redeemed in the first place. A childish whim went awry. No one would blame a child for such a thing, yet her suffering becomes a way of life for her, gaining mythic proportions. One supposes Trevor intended just this sort of irrationality, but that doesn't make the book a satisfying work of art.