The Story of Lucy Gault: A Novel (Paperback)

~ (Author) "Captain Everard Gault wounded the boy in the right shoulder on the night of June the twenty-first, nineteen twenty-one..." (more)
Key Phrases: hydrangea lawn, crossing stones, Captain Gault, Canon Crosbie, Everard Gault (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A difficult novel for any parent to read, William Trevor's The Story of Lucy Gault recounts the tale of a young girl whose Protestant family is driven from its rural Irish home in 1921. Eight-year-old Lucy is in love with Lahardane: the old house itself, the woods, the nearby beach, the shells and fir cones and sticks that she collected like treasure. The day before her family is scheduled to flee Ireland, leaving the house and furnishings in the care of trusted servants, Lucy runs away. Her parents, finding a scrap of her clothing on the beach, assume the worst. Days later, they leave Lahardane, choosing not to settle in England, as they had planned, but to roam Europe in their grief, leaving no forwarding address. But Lucy has not killed herself; she's only broken her leg in the woods. Eventually she makes it back to the house to find her parents gone. She spends her childhood waiting to be forgiven for her wicked act, postponing all happiness until she can be reunited with her mother and father. Revealing more of the plot will spoil this lovely novel for its many readers. It is enough to note that Trevor's characteristic depth and emotional complexity are fully realized here in the watchful reticence of his young heroine and the strange but beautiful way she finds to express her own forgiveness. --Regina Marler --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Trevor (Death in Summer) is one of the finest prose stylists writing today; his delicately shaded novels and stories often have a Chekhovian sense of loss and longing. This novel, with its elegiac tale of a quiet, sad life lived in the shadow of a wrecked childhood, could well have been penned by the Russian master. Lucy is nine years old when her father, a wealthy Irish army captain married to an Englishwoman, shoots at and wounds one of a trio of locals trying to set his Irish country house, Lahardane, afire in the 1920s. Captain Gault and his wife, Heloise, decide they must leave for England and safety, but Lucy, who has known no other home but Lahardane, flees into the woods on the eve of their departure and cannot be found. Eventually convinced she has drowned at a nearby beach, her parents leave for a life of wandering and grieving exile in Europe, utterly out of touch with their old life. Lucy, however, is discovered, starved but alive, days later by two faithful retainers, who with the aid of a family lawyer keep the house open as Lucy grows into womanhood. [...] Trevor's deeply poetic sense of the Irish character and countryside, his magical evocation of the passing of time, have never been more eloquent. This is a book to be quietly cherished. (Sept. 30) Forecast: Admirers of the author will need no urging to seek this out, and widespread and positive review attention should help win new ones.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (August 26, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 014200331X
• ISBN-13: 978-0142003312
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (58 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #69,526 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 26 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 (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

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.

9 of 9 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.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Riveting and Heart-Rending., June 3, 2003

By A Customer

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

Ireland, early 20th-century: in the midst of a volatile political climate, a family is forced to move in a hurry. They go to France, believing their young daughter dead-but she's not. Lost while visiting her favorite local places for what she believes to be the last time, among the crags and cliffs by the sea, an item of clothing caught in a branch seems proof to the horrified family and friends that she is gone, drowned.

William Trevor's riveting and suspenceful novel is the work of an experienced and masterful storyteller. More conventional in plot and form than most books I review, I can tell you no more than the information in that first paragraph unless I want to do a book report, not a book review. The review is that this novel is captivating, horrifying, tender, and astoundingly beautiful. Trevor writes not a word too few or a word too many, and his plotting and narrative timing are close to perfect.

Genius, it's probably not. But I'm getting incresingly tired of writers who shoot the moon every single time. I've read Trevor's stories, and there as here find him to be a supurb craftsman in an established British prose tradition-but what makes him stand out is his empathy--the capacity to genuinely affect the reader-and the lyrical atmosphere, his uncanny ability to create a lush literary landscape peopled with those crippled with gut-wrenching anxieties and pain. The result is a stylistic and narrative resonance of taut and tempestuous power.

If you want something fast-paced and saucy, you won't find it here. But if you can enjoy a novel by, say, Graham Greene, or appreciate the unique talent involved in writing such a book....then the present volume is better even than that. Or at least it won't let you down. For when it comes to telling a story, lots of people can do it. But for me, when the story is told well, in a traditional way, and yet the feeling it leaves me with is best described as "eerie" or "disquieting"--then maybe it wasn't so traditional after all.