Product Description

Captain Gault has decided that his family must leave Lahardane. They are after all Protestants living in the big house in rural Cork, and the country is in turmoil. It is 1921. But 8-year-old Lucy can't bear to leave the seashore, the old house, thewoods - so she hatches a plan. It is then that the calamity happens - an accident almost, but so vicious in its consequences that it blights the lives of the Gaults for years to come. Trevor's new novel beautifully evokes rural Ireland and the tensions existing there, but also is Hardy-like in its portrayal of the impact of mere chance on a life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7676 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04-24
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Chance is the central theme and malevolent force of William Trevor's The Story of Lucy Gault. In this haunting novel, suffused with melancholy, Trevor, a masterful chronicler of the sad, lonely and unfulfilled, recounts the tragic life story of a woman buffeted by fate.

The book opens in County Cork in 1921 with the eponymous Lucy as a small girl oblivious to the changes sweeping across Ireland. The Gaults are a Protestant land-owning family: Lucy's father, Captain Everard, was an officer in the British Army and her mother Heliose is English. When three local lads attempt to set fire to their ancestral home Lahardane (a country house in the vein of Elizabeth Bowen's Bowen's Court) Everard shoots and wounds one of the intruders, Horahan. The shot proves to have disastrous and reverberating consequences for the family: consequences that might appear melodramatic if Trevor didn't unfurl them with such subtlety and poise.

Everard and Heloise opt to leave Ireland but just before they are about to depart Lucy runs away. Convinced that she has drowned, the Gaults reluctantly head off into exile. Lucy is discovered alive but attempts to contact her kin fail. As her parents mournfully journey across Europe, Lucy, raised by two faithful servants, whiles away the years reading and waiting for their return. Her isolated existence at Lahardane is finally broken when Ralph, a young teacher, accidentally stumbles upon the house. Slowly, a romance blossoms, although Lucy, plagued by guilt and the ghosts of the past, is simply unable to grasp this chance of happiness. She does eventually find a kind of redemption (kept tantalisingly until the final chapters) but her tale, told with extraordinary beauty, compassion and precision, is ultimately one of endless disappointments. --Travis Elborough

The Guardian, August 31, 2002
'[a] gravely beautiful, subtle and haunting Irish novel'

Literary Review, September, 2002
'there will only be a handful of novels worth reading this year...and this book is certainly one'

Customer Reviews

A haunting, heartbeaking page-turner.
This is a ghost story, but the ghosts are not dead, they are only "playing at being dead".
In Ireland, in the summer of 1921, Anglo-Irish families are caught in the war between the IRA and the British Army and many of their big houses are being put on fire. Captain Gault and his wife Heloise decide to leave Ireland much to the distress of their eight-year-old daughter Lucy. She decides on a plan to force them to stay but her actions have disastrous, unforeseeable consequences.
The plot is so poignant I could hardly bear to read on but I had to find out what happens next.
William Trevor's writing is beautiful and subtle. There isn't a word out of place. The pace of the story is calm and mesmerising, almost dreamlike, but the desire to discover Lucy's fate will keep you reading into the night.
I agreed with every complimentary word of the blurbs on the cover.
This is a sublime novel, much better than Life of Pi which beat it for the Man Booker prize 2002. But life isn't fair as The Story of Lucy Gault epitomizes.

an Irish classic
It is 1921 in rural Cork. But life in their big old house is anything but tranquil for the Protestant Gault family. In the midst of political turmoil, Captain Gault decides they must leave their house in Lahardane. But 8 year old Lucy has other ideas and makes her own plans. It is Lucy, then, who (rather like Bridget in Ian McEwan's 'Atonement')sets in train a sequence of events with devastating consequences for her family for many years to come. This is classic William Trevor. He writes simply, in an almost understated way, but very memorably, and evocatively. This book combines an intimate portrait of rural Ireland with a brilliant sense of tension, and the vulnerability of us all to the chance events of everyday life.

A brilliant book
This was my first William Trevor book.Though I struggled at the very start of the book once it got going I could not put it down.The story of Lucy is sad but brilliantly told.Trevor has a gift,his writing style breathaking,his descriptions of characters and life remarkable.Though the book covers a long period of time the feeling of a changing world comes across brilliantly.I loved the 'old' Ireland at the start of the book and I feel that the sadness of a lost way of life came accross as well as the lonely and sad existance of Lucy.His characters all have burdens they carry heavily in life bringing home the hard realities that many of us face in our journey through life.
I loved this book for many reasons.It is different to anything I have read and Trevors style is sheer genius.You will follow Lucy through her troubled life and be left to ponder on what could or should have been if this tradgedy had happened in present day.Unmissable read this now !