Two beautiful, memorable novels in one volume, both focussing on women who retreat into their imaginations until the boundaries between what is real and what is not become blurred. In 'Reading Turgenev', which was shortlisted for the 1991 Booker Prize, an Irish country girl is trapped in a loveless marriage with an older man. But she finds unusual solace - in secret meetings with a man who shares her passion for Russian novels. The second story, 'My House in Umbria' tells how romantic novelist Emily Delahunty helps the survivors of a bomb attack on a train and invents colourful pasts for her convalescent patients.

An Englishwoman is taken in by a duplicitous suitor in this "constantly surprising work" from the Whitbread Award–winning author of Love and Summer (John Updike, The New Yorker). Forty-seven-year-old widow Julia Ferndale can't believe her good luck—she's about to remarry. What's more, her fiancé, Francis Tyte, is a charming actor and magazine model fourteen years her junior. Her daughters are thrilled. Her mother is suspicious. But unfortunately for Julia, she keeps those suspicions to herself. After the wedding, Francis reveals a past that includes an abandoned wife, a mistress and child, and the many others he's used and left behind to deal with his wreckage. Finding herself suddenly added to their number, Julia is shocked out of her dream and onto a sobering journey that leads into the savage realities of the world. "Pungent with the sense of evil and corruption." —John Updike, The New Yorker...

“To my mind Trevor's best novel and a very fine one. —Graham Greene In this award-winning novel, an informer''s body is found on the estate of a wealthy Irish family shortly after the First World War, and an appalling cycle of revenge is set in motion. Led by a zealous sergeant, the Black and Tans set fire to the family home, and only young Willie and his mother escape alive. Fatherless, Willie grows into manhood while his alcoholic motherÂ's bitter resentment festers. And though he finds love, Willie is unable to leave the terrible injuries of the past behind.

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.**

Penguin Decades bring you the novels that helped shape modern Britain. When they were published, some were bestsellers, some were considered scandalous, and others were simply misunderstood. All represent their time and helped define their generation, while today each is considered a landmark work of storytelling.William Trevor's The Children of Dynmouth was first published in 1976. In it we follow awkward, lonely, curious teenager Timothy Gedge as he wanders around the bland south-coast seaside town of Dynmouth. Timothy takes a prurient interest in the lives of the adults there, who only realize the sinister purpose to which he seeks to put his knowledge too late. This brilliant novel is eerily prescient as it shows a young person's obsession with fame and his capacity for evil.

'No matter what,' Julia had said, aware then of what was coming, 'let's always play cards.' And they did; for even with her memory gone, a little more of it each day - her children taken, her house, her flowerbeds, belongings, clothes - their games in the communal drawing room were a reality her affliction allowed. A husband sits in Harry's Bar in Venice, thinking of his wife - lost to him now - whose plea has brought him back to one of their favourite haunts. On another table, a young couple quarrel. Cheating at Canasta is the title story of William Trevor's new collection, his first since the highly acclaimed A Bit on the Side (2004), and its themes of missed opportunities, the inevitability of change and the powerful but fragmentary quality of our memories are entirely characteristic of his unparalleled oeuvre.

The Old Boys by William Trevor - a novel of power, revenge, love and the failure of love from one of the world's best writersA group of septuagenarians revive schoolboy conflicts in the election of the President of the Old Boys Association. Jaraby expects to get the job, but he reckons without the bitterness of Nox, who still remembers the humiliations of his school years. And when Jaraby's son gets into trouble with the law, Nox has the perfect stick with which to beat him.Their powers may be failing but the old boys possess a fierce understanding of the things in life that matter - power, revenge, hatred, love, and the failure of love.The Old Boys was William Trevor's acclaimed first novel. It will be enjoyed by fans of The Story of Lucy Gault and Felicia's Journey, as well as readers of Colm Toibin and William Boyd.'Uncommonly well-written, gruesome , funny and original' Evelyn...

William Trevor is one of the renowned figures in contemporary literature, described as 'the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language' by the New Yorker and acclaimed for his haunting and profound insights into the human heart. Here is the ultimate collection of his short fiction, with dozens of tales spanning his career and ranging from the moving to the macabre, the humorous to the haunting. From the penetrating 'Memories of Youghal' to the bittersweet 'Bodily Secrets' and the elegiac 'Two More Gallants', here are masterpieces of insight, depth, drama and humanity, acutely rendered by a modern master.