Introduction

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.

Editorial Review

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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