William Trevor, like many of the characters in his novels and stories, is something of a con artist. The boring opening to his new novel, Other People's Worlds, is a setup…. That Trevor is willing to lull us for 20 or so pages, only to jolt us back awake by revealing that Francis Tyte, the intended groom [of Julia Ferndale] is in fact an impostor with the sinister mission of violating the peaceful contentment of Swan House, is the first of Trevor's tricks in this novel, one of many masterful strokes by which he shifts our perceptions. (p. 3)

On one level, this new novel is an old-fashioned, very readable, Gothic tale about the dialectic between good and evil, truth and illusion, innocence and guilt. Yet it is also a thoroughly contemporary work, not only in its details (this is an England of "Pizzaland" and television addiction), but in the...