[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 displays both his usual craftsmanship and his uncanny insight into the human heart.

But what of William Trevor for the as-yet-uninitiated? Except for the Italy of its title story, the stories are set in his native Ireland and in England and Northern Ireland, where Trevor has spent his life. Trevor has observed of his own earlier writing, “I think I am interested in people who are not necessarily the victims of other people, but simply the victims of circumstances. … I'm very interested in the sadness of fate, the things that just happen to people.” One thinks of his “Child's Play,” about the two unrelated children thrown intimately together after their adulterous parents swap marital partners for a brave new family.

If critics have a complaint against Trevor, it is that some find his prose “dispassionate”—dry and emotionally flat. In fact, he is scrupulous in leaving it to readers to probe the depths of his observations in the echo chambers of their own hearts. This is perfect subtlety, and After Rain is a literary achievement best left to those who don't need a laugh track to get it.