Love and Summer

Starred review from July 6, 2009
The tragic consequences of a woman’s lost honor and a family’s shame haunt several generations in Trevor’s masterful 14th novel. His prose precisely nuanced and restrained, Trevor depicts a society beginning to loosen itself from the Church’s implacable condemnation of sexual immorality. Years ago, Miss Connulty’s dragon of a mother forced her into lifelong atonement after she was abandoned by her lover. Now, in the mid-1950s, middle-aged and forever marked for spinsterhood in her small Irish town, she is intent on protecting Ellie Dillahan, the naïve young wife of an older farmer. A foundling raised by nuns, Ellie was sent to housekeep for the widowed farmer, and she is content until her dormant emotions are awakened by a charming but feckless bachelor, Florian Kilderry, who has plans to soon leave Ireland. Their affair is bittersweet, evoking Florian’s regretful knowledge that he will cause heartbreak and Ellie’s shy but urgent passion and culminating in a surprising resolution. Trevor renders the fictional town of Rathmoye with the precise detail of a photograph, while his portrait of its inhabitants is more subtle and painterly, suggesting their interwoven secrets, respectful traditions and stoic courtesy.

Starred review from August 1, 2009
The poignancy of life worn down at the elbows, Trevor's signature note, gently animates another masterpiece.

Until Florian Kilderry, ineffectual photographer sporting a loud necktie, bicycled into Rathmoye, a town where"nothing happened," Ellie Dillahan never knew she didn't love her husband."A young Catholic girl from the hills," she's the sort of secretly budding wallflower that Trevor (Cheating at Canasta: Stories, 2007, etc.) typically invests somehow with magic. Ordinary character and circumstance akilter make up his mtier, and Rathmoye's chockablock with both: a Joycean funeral, middle-aged siblings sharing telepathy, a centenarian belting IRA songs from his deathbed, a homeless madman hoarding the useless papers of a long-penniless blueblood family. Inside Ellie, quiet foundling darling of the nuns who reared her, burns long-hidden longing. A grateful contentment grounds her marriage to Dillahan, an aging farmer haunted by the deaths of his child and first wife in an accident he feels he caused. But passion? None. So when Florian turns friendly, she imagines this child of artists, reader of Fitzgerald and Dostoevsky, heir to an 18-room manse, as a romantic, exotic deliverer. And he does turn tender, drawn to Ellie's pathos, charm and homespun toughness. The attraction simmers; the pair begin to dream of each other, and village tongues start wagging. But Florian withholds a secret: The mansion's a wreck, he's buried in debt and only a passport away from Ireland will resurrect him. She fantasizes fire and sweetness; he frets about her with kindness and pity. Pulled between duty and beauty, Ellie is terrified that decent, dear Dillahan will detect her, and agonizes that her soul, nurtured by the nuns into vigilant virtue, will be lost. Will she be lost yet worse should she fail to dare?

An archetypal Irish love story and a perfect novel—sweet, desperate, sad, unforgettable.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from August 15, 2009
Trevor's first novel since 2002's Booker-shortlisted "The Story of Lucy Gault" beautifully reveals the summer love that blooms between Ellie Dillahan, an orphan who has become a farmer's wife, and Florian Kilderry, a bachelor haunted by his muse yet lacking any means of expressing his art. Ellie and Florian meet in Rathmoye, a small Irish town where the influential and tragic Connulty family owns several concerns, including a burned-out cinema and a boarding house. Only Miss Connulty and her brother, Joseph Paul, remain to enact the final scene of their family's drama, into which the young lovers have unwittingly stumbled. Trevor directs his characters to a stunning conclusion that affirms love's sustaining influence even in the midst of heartache and profound disappointment. VERDICT Trevor's latest is rich in dazzling imagery, especially variations on light, illumination, and reflection, and unforgettable characters like Orpen Wren, a potentially senile librarian. This is another masterly work from one of our greatest contemporary novelists. J. Greg Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2009
Do summer and love automatically, or at least frequently, go hand in hand? Its a nice sentiment, but in Trevors latest (his fourteenth) novel, he tests the legitimacy of that quaint idea (or is it a perfect ideal?). The setting for his exploration of how love and summer mix, or dont mix, is customary Trevor territory: rural, small-town Ireland in the 1950s. Raised in a Catholic orphanage, Ellie Dillahan is eventually farmed out by the nuns to keep house for an area farmer, a widower. With love having nothing to do with it, he and Ellie stumble into marriage. Her life is now satisfactory, until one summer when she meets a young photographer who has returned to the region to sell his family property and leave Ireland altogether. She falls in love; he doesnt. Trevor predictably matches an exquisite but never precious prose style with wise psychological understanding of the fluster beneath the surface of ordinary lives. Another extraordinary novel certain to please Trevors devoted readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)