SOURCE: Kessler, Rod. Review of After Rain, by William Trevor. Review of Contemporary Fiction 17, no. 3 (fall 1997): 239-40.

In the following review, Kessler offers a positive assessment of After Rain.

Because he has published twenty-two books—short-story collections, novellas and novels, certainly, but also plays, nonfiction, and a children's book—because he has won such prestigious prizes as the Heinemann Award and the Whitbread (twice, so far), because his stories appear not only in Antaeus but, frequently, in the New Yorker and Harpers, and because he's considered by some critics as “the greatest living writer of short stories,” it's likely that readers will know the work of William Trevor, whose new collection of short stories, After Rain, has just appeared. For such readers, suffice it to say that in these twelve stories—about wives, husbands, lovers, and heartbreak; about children and parents and heartbreak; about friends and thieves—Trevor...