After Rain: Stories - Softcover

After Rain - Twelve remarkable stories by the master storyteller William Trevor

'There is no better short story writer in the English-speaking world' Wall Street Journal

In this collection of twelve dazzling, acutely rendered tales, William Trevor plumbs the depths of the human heart. Here we encounter a blind piano tuner whose wonderful memories of his first wife are cruelly distorted by his second; a woman in a difficult marriage who must choose between her indignant husband and her closest friend; two children, survivors of divorce, who mimic their parents' melodramas; and a heartbroken woman traveling alone in Italy who experiences an epiphany while studying a forgotten artist's Annunciation.
Trevor is, in his own words, 'a storyteller. My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so.' Conscious or not, he touches us in ways that few writers even dare to try.

'A luminous, disturbing collection of short stories by a master of the form' New York Times Book Review

'Each of the twelve stories in William Trevor's glittering new collection, After Rain, surveys a quietly devastating little earthquake. Tremors that ensue when pressure is put on a fault-line running through a marriage, family or friendship are traced with fine precision' Sunday Times

'These stories look quiet, but they can be cut through with violence and cruelty. Trevors puts his innocents in the grasp of tricksters and brutes... It is a mark of his subtlety and wisdom that he can make us feel so differently, in different stories, about acceptance' Independent on Sunday

'With each new volume you can see why William Trevor is the envy of so many writers' Daily Telegraph Books of the Year