A mysterious dark-haired stranger
disrupts a quiet little village
 LOVE AND SUMMER
by William Trevor
ISBN 978-0-307-39840-6
Publisher: Knopf Canada
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By SHARON GREER
During one long summer in the small town of Rathmoye, Ireland, a vulnerable young married woman develops a reckless attachment to an enigmatic visitor. This is the premise to William Trevor’s new novel, Love and Summer, a double tale of unrequited love.
When a dark-haired stranger rides his bicycle into this town of the 1960s and starts taking photographs of people attending a funeral, the whole place takes notice.
Florian Kilderry’s arrival sets off a series of events that change the lives of a handful of residents and irrevocably changes the life of one innocent soul.
He has made an appearance in order to take care of some unfinished business but inadvertently disrupts the calm and stillness of this quiet little place.
The unfortunate young woman, Ellie, who falls in love with this capricious, selfish man is married to a kind but older farmer struggling with the knowledge that he was accidentally responsible for the deaths of his first wife and their child.
Ellie is the young convent girl who came to work for the farmer when he was widowed. But the lure and power of her passionate feelings for the fickle Florian overrule her senses, sending her down a path of foolhardy abandon.
The one and only person in town able to recognize and understand the events unfolding between the two young lovers is Miss Connulty, recently liberated by the death of her domineering mother.
Her extraordinary insights and compassion towards the plight of Ellie’s situation are tenderly rendered on the pages of this deeply eloquent story.
William Trevor has an enormous amount of empathy for his characters and his narratives always manage to envelop the reader slowly and completely while overcoming your senses with poignant melancholy.
Trevor demonstrates his profound ability to understand human nature with all its foibles in this masterful work by one of the best contemporary European writers of our time.
Trevor was born in County Cork and studied at Trinity College, Dublin. In 1999 his disturbing novel, Felicia’s Journey, was made into a formidable film by Canadian filmmaker, Atom Egoyan.
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