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At the heart of this stunning collection is Trevor’s characteristic tenderness and unflinching eye for both the humanizing and dehumanizing aspects of modern urban and rural life.

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"Chronicler of Interiority"

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Trevor, as usual, writes stories marked first of all by a startling realism of surface. The sights, sounds, smells of the external world are precisely captured and rendered. We see for instance the central female character of "A Bit On The Side" pecking away at a plastic wrapped salad from a nearby Pret a Manger, while her male companion eats a sandwich smelling faintly of marmite with lettuce leaves overhanging its edges. What we know, but the male companion can't, is that the woman continuing to eat her salad actually has no appetite for it. In such a minor detail lies the open sesame to Trevor's art. He takes the reader on a journey into the interior lives of his forlorn characters, showing us that what they reveal to others even in minor matters may be often less than the truth or even the opposite of it. In "Sitting With The Dead," a second example, the central figure Emily tells the visiting Legion of Mary sisters a lot but finally far less about her valuation of her late husband than we the readers are allowed to know. Trevor consistently exposes to his readers, then, that gap which renders people frequently opaque to one another and is in major matters at the core of their ultimate oddity, even mysteriousness. His is artistic fiction of the highest order.

Trevor's Unnerving Bits and Pieces

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William Trevor is surely one of the most talented current writers of fiction, and a remarkable master of the short story form. And we find him at his best in "A Bit On the Side." His work is subtle, disquieting, unnerving, with a distinct tendency to transmute the fictional world he's constructing, that you thought you understood, into something quite different: and he does it right before your very eyes. Some of these stories are set in the United Kingdom, some in Ireland, as befits the work of an Irishman resident in the U.K.; a man never quite at home anywhere. He gives us a woman waiting at a theater bar for a blind date she's going to regret meeting; a private midlands boys'school where nothing is as it should be; a hotel waiter who takes his job way too seriously. And in his title story,of which we have certain expectations based on the world as we know it: well, he just turns them upside down. His people are sometimes kinder than you might expect, often nastier, but seldom what you thought you were getting.

Decent, if forgettable, stories

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Perhaps mine is a case of mismanaged expectations, but I found this collection to be a merely average entry in the literary short story genre. The prose is excellent, of course, and some of the stories stand out, but most of them fail to impress, especially at their endings, which, almost without exception, are marked by forced poetry and profundity, as if Trevor felt that the story didn't hold well enough together on its own and needed an expository coda. Overall, good but not great. Try some of his other stuff.

Tinkering with Secrets and Other Hidden Things

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William Trevor guides us through streets and dank parlors and weakly lighted public places where his characters guard or choose to unravel those darker aspects of living he understands so well. In A BIT ON THE SIDE Trevor has written twelve short stories that could have been written by no one else. His prodigious gifts as a writer make him privy to the musings we all hold in private, knowing that voicing them would doubtless find misunderstanding glances in parting eyes of the people in retreat from our confessions. Where does Trevor find these thoughts, much less these subtly drawn characters? In lonely corner tables in pubs, in the shy fears of wives of husbands departed in body or in spirit, in expectations of young Irish girls dreaming of better lives in America, or of poor pregnant mothers willing to offer their incipient child for adoption to spare their husband's jobless humiliation? While William Trevor is a demanding author, one who graces his stories with subtle time lapses or changes that require the reader to be on the alert for the assured nuances of his craft, he is never less than amazing in his ability to paint portraits of people so odd in their ordinariness that ending a short story does not allow us to leave them alone. This is writing of the highest order - challenging, enriching, plangently longing, unforgettable. These are twelve treasures. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, February 2005

A short-story collection that made me FEEL!

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I have read many great short-story collections, but this one is the best I have read in a very long time. A Bit on the Side showcases several of the darkest, bleakest, most thought provoking and haunting short stories out there. William Trevor has delved into human emotion in a way that most short-story writers aren't able to convey in a few pages. Some of the stories touched me, others disturbed me. And that is what I love about this collection. Trevor made me FEEL for the characters. A book is definitely a keeper when the language is so palpable it almost jumps out of the pages. My favorite stories are "Sitting with the Dead," "Justina's Priest," "Traditions," and "A Bit on the Side." I haven't read Trevor's previous efforts, but I will definitely give them a whirl. I cannot recommend A Bit on the Side: Stories enough.