Love and Summer

It's summer and nothing much is happening in Rathmoye. So it doesn't go unnoticed when a dark-haired stranger appears on his bicycle and begins photographing the mourners at Mrs Connulty's funeral. Florian Kilderry couldn't know that the Connultys are said to own half the town: he has only come to Rathmoye to photograph the scorched remains of its burnt-out cinema. But Mrs Connulty's daughter, liberated at last by the death of her imperious mother, resolves to keep an eye on Florian Kilderry, and it's she who comes to witness the events that follow.

A few miles out in the country, Dillahan, a farmer and a decent man, continues to live with the knowledge that he was accidentally responsible for the deaths of his wife and baby. He has married again: Ellie is the young convent girl who came to work for him when he was widowed. She falls in love with Florian Kilderry and, although he is planning to leave Ireland and begin all over again after what he considers to be his failed life, a dangerously reckless attachment develops between them.

In a characteristically masterly way Trevor evokes the passions and frustrations felt by Ellie and Florian, and by the people of a small Irish town during one long summer.

Love and Summer is William Trevor's eagerly awaited new novel, his first since the Booker-shortlisted The Story of Lucy Gault.

'In prose as clear and pure as a mountain stream . . .

Trevor beautifully succeeds in describing the emotionally charged dilemmas that surge in the hearts of the quietest of people' Marie Claire