[In the following review, Fitzgerald-Hoyt agues that Trevor achieves a coherency in the twelve stories about revelations contained in the collection After Rain.]

In the title story of William Trevor's stunning new collection, After Rain, a young woman who has traveled to Italy to come to terms with a failed love affair as well as a troubled family past reflects upon a painting of the Annunciation in the church of Santa Fabiola:

The Virgin looks alarmed, right hand arresting her visitor's advance. Beyond—background to the encounter—there are gracious arches, a balustrade and then the sky and hills. There is a soundlessness about the picture, the silence of a mystery: no words are spoken in this captured moment, what's said between the two has already been spoken.

The scene is echoed on the book's dust jacket: a detail from a fifteenth-century Annunciation by Fra Bartolommeo and Mariotto Albertinelli focuses upon the angel's serious face and upraised, faintly minatory finger; the Virgin's hand seems to attempt to ward him off, to reject his message. Behind these poised figures stretches an Italian landscape of subdued beauty, the watery sunlight unable to illuminate the suppressed drama of the clustered buildings and distant hills.

Annunciation is an appropriate trope for these twelve stories, for all contain moments of revelation for reader and character alike. But, as implied in the Virgin's reluctant hand, annunciations can be wrenching experiences, their news unwelcome.

Ten of these stories previously appeared in magazines, yet the collection is nevertheless cohesive. Their varied settings—Ireland, England, Italy. Northern Ireland—and their diverse characters have in common a theme that pervades all of Trevor's fiction: people's abortive attempts to love and their success in damaging each other. The "annunciations" they undergo are often bitter and painful revelations. The eponymous "Gilbert's Mother" is convinced that her mentally disturbed son is a murderer, but without evidence, she is stymied. The parents in "Marrying Damian," who were once amused by their philandering, manipulative friend, realize their insensitivity to his victims only after it becomes apparent that their own daughter will be his next. The physically blind husband of "The Piano Tuner's Wives" must depend on his wives to describe a world he cannot see, but his second wife, who becomes a bride at 59, is so resentful of and threatened by her deceased predecessor that she attempts to obliterate her husband's memories. Her descriptions of the places he has visited with his first wife are deliberate falsehoods that challenge and undermine his cherished recollections.

The displaced children, disaffected spouses, and alienated souls that inhabit so much of Trevor's world are much in evidence in After Rain, but this collection offers fresh perspectives, new characters. "The Potato Dealer" plays a new variation on such earlier stories as "Teresa's Wedding" and "Kathleen's Field", where Irish daughters become pawns in the face of social convention and economic exigency. Yet here, Ellie, pregnant as the result of an affair with a curate and pressured into a loveless marriage by her rigid family, worsens an already bleak situation. The unromantic potato dealer who has married her in exchange for money and land comes to love her child, who believes him to be her father. Ellie's insistence that the child be told the truth is ultimately selfish, the unburdening of her mind rendering her daughter the object of gossip and wounding her husband's pride and self-esteem.

Since the 1970s, perhaps the major preoccupation of Trevor's Irish fiction has been the consequences of colonialism, including the tragedies wrought by political violence. The finest story in this collection, "Lost Ground," first appeared in The New Yorker in 1992. Its reappearance is both an aesthetic delight and a sad commentary on contemporary Northern Irish history, for in the recent past it seemed that this harrowing tale of an Ulster Protestant family might become historical fiction rather than a installment of the current "news from Ireland". The aptly-named Milton, son of a militantly Unionist family, sees or imagines a vision of St. Rosa, and sets out to "justify the ways of God" to humanity by embarking on a peacemaking mission. But his mission embarrasses his family, who through their silence become complicit when his own brother murders him. At once a haunting tale of a gentle soul's destruction and an allegory of Northern Irish history. "Lost Ground" recalls such Trevor masterpieces as "The News From Ireland" and The Silence in the Garden.

On the back cover of After Rain, the aforementioned "Annunciation" is reproduced in its entirety, and the shift in perspective changes everything: now we see the Virgin's modest face and gentle, downcast eyes; the benedictory presence of God the Father. The landscape that loomed so large in the detail now fades into the distant background. Similarly, when Harriet, the unhappy protagonist in the title story, looks more closely at her painted Annunciation, her perspective shifts: "It isn't alarm in the Virgin's eyes, it's wonderment. In another moment there'll be serenity." This dual perspective is also an appropriate assessment of Trevor's artistry, for his closely observed, deeply compassionate stories winkle out the Virgin's reluctance, the myriad doubts, fears, and petty dishonesties that define our daily lives. Yet these painful annunciations burst upon us in subtle, ironic, beautifully realized prose. And therein lie both wonderment and serenity.