William Trevor’s stories are mosaics. They explore the actions, opinions and deeply ingrained views of people; the elderly, Irish, English, victims and perpetrators of The Troubles, those affected by war, the mad.

In the title story an illicit affairs smolders, gets hot, then sputters to an unsatisfying end over a number of years. War takes a toll on those at home in Matilda’s England, as Matilda grows from a young girl to middle-age and discovers her own cruelty that’s a reflection of the cruelty of war itself. In Torridge, an object of ridicule at an all-boy’s school gets revenge of sorts decades later.

Trevor depicts moral quandaries, and often the wrong choice has been made. In Death in Jerusalem a priest delays telling his brother about the death of their mother during a once in a lifetime trip to the Holy Land in an effort to not cut the trip short.

A strong collection of some of Trevor’s finest. ( )

I forget where I first heard Trevor’s name, but wherever it was it must have been enough for me to buy this book when I stumbled across it. And… well, it’s lit fic of the type which seems to give lit fic a bad name. The stories are good, varied in subject, and show a fine eye for detail and observation. But they are also either domestic or turn on tiny changes of circumstance, and often prove to be the sort of story which seems to rely on fine prose to impress rather than observation, insight or plot – and in most of the stories, the prose is good, without being especially so. According to Wikipedia, Trevor is “widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language”. So that’s me told off. Doubtless the stories in Lovers of their Time and Other Stories have much to offer to readers of contemporary short stories, but I found little in there to make them stand out especially for me. And I do like lit fic. But I like it a little more adventurous than Trevor writes, or with more landscape (see above). Having said that, Trevor is good at period detail – although I wonder how intentional this is in the stories set in the 1970s – which does give an added layer of much-needed charm. Another writer whose oeuvre, I suspect, I will not be exploring… ( )