Two Lives: Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria

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Two Lives: Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria

Author: William Trevor
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Publisher: Penguin Books
William Trevor’s astonishing range as a writer—his humor, subtlety, and compassionate grasp of human behavior—is fully demonstrated in these two short novels. In Reading Turgenev, a lonely country girl escapes her loveless marriage in the arms of a bookish young man. In My House in Umbria, a former madam befriends the other survivors of a terrorist bombing with surprising results.
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Amazon.com

The two lives of the title are brilliantly illuminated in a pair of short novels, Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria, that exemplify the biting, tragicomic work of this Anglo-Irish master. The first novel is a sorrowful love story, the second a sort of thriller. Each of Trevor’s two heroines is trapped in her life, one in Ireland and the other in Italy, and each has some experience of the transformative power of literature, a subject the author knows at first hand. Nobody can break your heart with such laconic precision. To be read with Bushmill’s in hand.

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