PENGUIN BOOKS
FELICIA’S JOURNEY
‘Felicia’s Journey is a masterpiece, one of the finest novels from the contemporary writer I have no doubt at all is simply the best we have … you read and are dazzled by how good it is … It has also one of the most memorable and convincing, most sinister and terrifying of characters created in the modern world, a character of truly Dickensian proportions’ Susan Hill, speaking at the Whitbread Novel Award ceremony
‘A quietly passionate tale saturated in despair … Trevor’s language is spot-on … he is a compassionate, but stern and unforgiving judge’ Geraldine Brennan in the Observer
‘This novel exhibits how emotional and psychological injury horribly incubates more injury … Trevor has never written with more humane energy and baleful bravura than he does in this elegy for unfortunates’ Peter Kemp in the Sunday Times
‘There is always more in William Trevor than a finely crafted story. His uncanny use of detail is piercingly visual … the closing sentence brings from the reader a satisfied sigh’ Brian Masters in the Literary Review
‘Masterly in its tension’ Thomas Kilroy in the Irish Times
‘It is a mark of Trevor’s great imaginative resources that he opens deep chambers of horror without ever describing an act of violence’ Anthony Quinn in the Independent
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William Trevor was born in 1928 at Mitchelstown, County Cork, spent his childhood in provincial Ireland, and now lives in Devon. He attended a number of Irish schools and later Trinity College, Dublin. He is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters. He has written many novels, including The Old Boys (1964), winner of the Hawthornden Prize; The Children of Dynmouth (1976) and Fools of Fortune (1983), both winners of the Whitbread Fiction Award; The Silence in the Garden (1988), winner of the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award; Two Lives (1991), which was shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and includes the Booker-shortlisted novella Reading Turgenev, Felicia’s Journey (1994), which won both the Whitbread and Sunday Express Book of the Year Awards; Death in Summer. (1998); and, most recently, The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), which was shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Whitbread Fiction Award. A celebrated short-story writer, his most recent collections are After Rain (1996); The Hill Bachelors, which won the Macmillan Silver Pen Award and the Irish Times Literature Prize; and A Bit on the Side (2004). He is also the editor of The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories (1989).
He has written plays for the stage and for radio and television; several of his television plays have been based on his short stories. Most of his books are available in Penguin.
In 1976 William Trevor received the Allied Irish Banks Prize, and in 1977 he was awarded an honorary CBE in recognition of his valuable services to literature. In 1992 he received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. In 1999 he was awarded the prestigious David Cohen British Literature Prize in recognition of a lifetime’s literary achievement. And in 2002, he was knighted for his services to literature.
