SOURCE: Binns, Stephen. “Humor, Melancholy Lurk in Irish Writer's Stories.” National Catholic Reporter 33, no. 29 (23 May 1997): 29.

In the following review, slightly revised by the author in 2003, Binns asserts that some of Trevor's stories in After Rain are among the writer's most imaginative and display a well-wrought craftsmanship.

When The Collected Stories of William Trevor came out, five years ago, it seemed definitive—the summing up of a long, masterly career in what we have long been told is a dying form. It had the heft of a monument: nearly 1,300 pages of prose that was itself sort of heavy, dense in its concision.

As a kind of bonus, then, comes After Rain, a collection of 12 new stories that revisit familiar Trevor territory: the suburbs of London, where people tend to create all kinds of emotional trouble by their sophisticated suppression of emotion; the holiday spots of Italy, which are not...