Although William Trevor was born to Protestant parents in Ireland, the writer described himself as a young man who was "very, very nationalistic, intensely Irish." Beginning his writing career with the publication of his novel titled A Standard of Behaviour in 1958, Trevor eventually won the Hawthornden Prize for literature for The Old Boys, published in 1964. This prize marked the auspicious beginning of Trevor's career as a successful writer. "The News from Ireland" is the title story from a 1986 short-story collection, and by the time of its publication, Trevor was generally considered a master of the genre.

The story of "The News from Ireland" hearkens back almost 150 years, to a cataclysmic event in Ireland's history: the Great Famine, which left over a million Irish dead from hunger and drove as many as two million to leave their country of birth. Many Irish peasants were dependent on the...