Death in Summer

There were three deaths that summer. The first was Letitia’s, sudden and quite unexpected, leaving her husband Thaddeus haunted by the details of her last afternoon, a drizzling Thursday in June. They had spent it arguing in their comfortable house in the country until Thaddeus reluctantly promised to visit a woman from his past – a promise he had no intention of keeping. The next death came some weeks later, after Thaddeus’s mother-in-law had helped him to interview the young woman who had answered their advertisement for a nanny to look after Letitia’s baby. None was suitable – least of all the last one, with her small, sharp features, her shabby clothes that reeked of cigarettes, her badly typed references – so Letitia’s mother moved in herself. But then, just as the household was beginning to settle down, the last of the nannies suprisingly returned, her unwelcome arrival heralding the third of the summer tragedies. William Trevor’s new novel is a sypathetic portrait of the sadness and damage that lies at the heart of some lives – both those that are obviously afflicted and those that appear to be blessed.