SOURCE: Murtaugh, Daniel M. “Stories You Live Within.” Commonweal 128, no. 6 (23 March 2001): 20-2.

In the following review, Murtaugh praises the believability and disturbing nature of the stories in The Hill Bachelors.

The Hill Bachelors gives strong support to the growing consensus that William Trevor is one of the very best writers of short stories alive. One can open this book, pick a paragraph at random, and imagine dozens of ways Trevor could have written it less effectively and did not, ways he could have added, or failed to excise, a word or phrase that would have made it easier, more explicit, but less focused in its power to disturb or to force recognition.

The stories, a dozen in this collection, are set in Ireland, England, and France, and many of them gently unravel mysteries. Following Horace's recipe for effective narration, they drop us—in medias res—into situations already...