Hailed as "probably the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language" by The New Yorker and "an extraordinarily mellifluous writer, seemingly incapable of composing an ungraceful sentence" by The New York Times Book Review, William Trevor is one of our most elegaic chroniclers of loss. Set in a provincial Irish town against the backdrop of the Second World War, Nights at the Alexandra is a masterpiece of short fiction. Tracing the reminiscences of a fifty-eight-year-old Irish cinema owner named Harry, the story recounts the years during Harry's adolescence when he forges an unlikely friendship with an ÈmigrÈ couple recently arrived in his small town. Gently imperious yet strikingly beautiful, Frau Messinger, a young British woman married to a much older German, introduces a measure of color into Harry's otherwise black-and-white existence. Disappointed by his dull family and his stifling boarding school, Harry soaks up Frau Messinger's stories of her youth and indulges her numerous flights of fancy. When Mr. Messinger announces his plans to build the town's first cinema and asks Harry to work its ticket window, Harry for the first time begins to imagine a life of possibility rather than privation. But the young man's newfound sense of himself comes not without its price, as William Trevor masterfully limns the border between innocence and experience, creating a subtle portrait of an adolescent moment that has the power to shape an entire lifetime.

Nights at the Alexandra

TREVOR,William

The Modern Library

In a small Irish town during World War II, Fifteen-year-old Harry's attachment to the Messingers, an emigrant couple, deepens despite his parent's disapproval

Nights at the Alexandra (Harper Short Novel Series)

Literature & Fiction

Harpercollins

Nights at the Alexandra (A Hutchinson novella)

Hutchinson

These autobiographical tales are about people and places, personal fascinations and enthusiasms, that have remained snagged in William Trevor's memory over the years. He writes here of childhood and youth, of his schools and university days, his early life in Dublin and London, o Ireland and of England. Most of the portraits are of people who have either been well known to him or casually met/ a few are drawn from the imagination, though the subjects are real. Some of the landscapes are equally familiar to him, while others are merely glimpsed: Persia in the early seventies, a Swiss valley, Country cork in the thirties, a Gloucestershire village, Venice in November, New York and San Francisco. "Places do not die as people do," William Trevor writes in his introduction, "but they often changed so fundamentally that little is left of what once they were. The landscape of the Nire valley that spreads over a northern part of Country Waterford is timeless, but the Dublin remembered here is the Dublin of several pasts, and elsewhere among these impressions there is that same dichotomy." Affectionate, poignant and often gently humorous, these essays are an expansion of a writer's notebook. Such excursions into memory convey the essence of William Trevor's world - read in conjunction with Lucy Willis's graceful illustrations, they illuminate unforgettably the background to this celebrated novels and short stories.

Excursions In Real World

Travel

Travel Writing

RANDOM HOUSE UK

Juliets Story

Juliet loved the folk stories Paddy Old used to tell, and when he died nothing was quite right anymore. She fell out with Kitty Ann, her mother was expecting a baby, and Juliet got as cross as two sticks. Then Grandmamma takes Juliet on a journey - a long journey, by train and boat and train and boat, so Grandmamma tells stories to while away the time. They are different from Paddy Old's stories, and they all seem to be a little bit about Juliet, as well as witches and Christmas sunflowers and talking snails. And when Juliet and her Grandmamma finally arrive at a small fishing port in France, a sea-trout and an amazing toy maker give Juliet the courage and insight to start a wonderful story of her own...

Juliet's Story

Red Fox

Hailed as "probably the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language" by The New Yorker  and "an extraordinarily mellifluous writer, seemingly incapable of composing an ungraceful sentence" by The New York Times Book Review, William Trevor is one of our most elegaic chroniclers of loss.Set in a provincial Irish town against the backdrop of the Second World War, Nights at the Alexandra is a masterpiece of short fiction. Tracing the reminiscences of a fifty-eight-year-old Irish cinema owner named Harry, the story recounts the years during Harry's adolescence when he forges an unlikely friendship with an ÈmigrÈ couple recently arrived in his small town. Gently imperious yet strikingly beautiful, Frau Messinger, a young British woman married to a much older German, introduces a measure of color into Harry's otherwise black-and-white existence. Disappointed by his dull family and his stifling boarding school, Harry soaks up Frau Messinger's stories of her youth and indulges her numerous flights of fancy. When Mr. Messinger announces his plans to build the town's first cinema and asks Harry to work its ticket window, Harry for the first time begins to imagine a life of possibility rather than privation. But the young man's newfound sense of himself comes not without its price, as William Trevor masterfully limns the border between innocence and experience, creating a subtle portrait of an adolescent moment that has the power to shape an entire lifetime.

NIGHTS AT THE ALEXANDRA

Contemporary

The little world of a public school, with its grudges and rivalries, reaches out into the little world of the aged, as the Old Boys grimly battle over the post of President of the Association.

Old Boys

Literary

Penguin Group USA

The day we got drunk on cake, and other stories

Short Stories & Anthologies

Penguin

Lady Dolores ran the offices of the Love Department, resolving the heartaches of the wives of Wimbledon. Now her protege was sent on a mission to learn the secrets of Septimus and to stop him in his tracks. Septimus was irresistible to women. Many had succumbed to his charm and more had died of it.

The Love Department

Penguin??Books

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