In his long writing life it was commonplace for critics to compare William Trevor to Chekhov; that’s how highly he was considered as a writer of short stories.  Although he wrote twenty or so novels – some of them wonderful – the short story was his true métier, the craft at which he excelled and in which, at least in my opinion, he had no equals, not even Chekhov and Alice Munro.

Last Stories is just that: the final collection of ten stories from the master who died in 2016.  Isn’t there a rule somewhere that says the powers of great artists inevitably decline in old age?  If so, William Trevor didn’t get the message because some of these stories are as good as anything he ever wrote and I imagine will make other writers, even those supposedly at their peak, groan with envy.

I gave Last Stories to a friend as a birthday gift and later wondered if I had chosen wisely.  A thick mist of melancholy clings to these stories.  No one reads Trevor for the jokes and there’s no denying that the dignity he saw in the human condition was something hard-won from solitude and often from quiet, unremarked loneliness.  The brilliance of his craft, though never showy, stopped me repeatedly as I read this beautiful collection of miniatures.  What a magnificent storyteller he was.