Nights at the Alexandra
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
Nights at the Alexandra by William Trevor - a classic early novel by one of the world's greatest writers
A brief encounter in wartime Ireland - the memory of which lasts a lifetime
In a small town in Ireland middle-aged Harry looks back on his wartime adolescence when he fetched and carried for the beautiful young Englishwoman who had taken over the big stone house with her much older German husband. But Frau Messinger's health is failing, and her husband decides to build a cinema in the town to honour her. Harry will work in it; one day he will own it; and he will always remain captive to the memory of the beguiling young woman who arrived suddenly from abroad and lit up his drab provincial life.
William Trevor's gift of understanding the poignancy in apparently small lives is beautifully realized in this short novel.
'Perfect in its making and its length' The Times
'Certainly lingers in the mind. I am prepared to bet that I will still remember it in a year's time, which is a test of genuine excellence' Harriet Waugh, Spectator
William Trevor was born in Ireland in 1928 and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He is regarded as one of the greatest short story writers in English, and has also written many award-winning novels, most recently The Story of Lucy Gault and Love and Summer. For many years he has lived in Devon.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The rather conventional device of a teenage boy whose life is changed and shaped by an encounter with a mysterious older woman is in Trevor's seasoned hands turned into a memorable tale. Calling it a "short novel'' to qualify for Harper's new series of that name, however, is a bit pretentious; a short story (as it ran in the New Yorker) has been divided into short chapters further fleshed out by Hogarth's illustrations. The narrator is 58-year-old Harry, still living in the provincial Irish town where the seminal event of his life occurred. Seeking refuge from WW II (and, it turns out, from the progress of a fatal illness) Herr and Frau Messengerhe 62, she 27take up residence at the estate called Cloverhill. At 15, already an outsider to his family because of his superior intelligence and sensitivity, Harry is immediately captivated by Frau Messenger. During frequent visits to Cloverhill and through her letters when he is at boarding school he comes further under her spell. The fact that she is dying is conveyed through Herr Messenger's gift and memorialto her and to the town: a cinema called the Alexandra (her name), which will save Harry from working in his father's lumberyard and bring romance and glamor to the drab lives of the townspeople. Trevor's prose bears its customary lucidity and grace, though once in a bit he slips into grandiloquence.
