Fools of Fortune

PENGUIN BOOKS

FOOLS OF FORTUNE

William Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, Co. Cork, in 1928, and spent his childhood in provincial Ireland. He attended a number of Irish schools and later Trinity College, Dublin. He is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters.

Among his books are The Old Boys (1964), winner of the Hawthornden Prize, The Boarding House (1965), The Love Department (1966), The Day We Got Drunk on Cake (1967), Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel (1969), Miss Gomez and the Brethren (1971), The Ballroom of Romance (1972), Elizabeth Alone (1973), Angels at the Ritz (1975), winner of the Royal Society of Literature Award, The Children of Dynmouth (1976), winner of the Whitbread Award, Lovers of Their Time (1978), The Distant Past (1979), Other People’s Worlds (1980), Beyond the Pale (1981), Fools of Fortune (1983), winner of the Whitbread Award, A Writer’s Ireland (1984), The News from Ireland (1986), The Silence in the Garden (1988), winner of the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award, Family Sins (1989) and Two Lives (1991), which was shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and includes the Booker shortlisted novella Reading Turgenev. He is the editor of The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories (1989), and has also written many plays for the stage and for radio and television. Several of his television plays have been based on his short stories. Many of his books are published by Penguin, including an omnibus, The Stories of William Trevor, containing five collections of stories. In 1976 William Trevor received the Allied Irish Banks’ Prize, and in 1977 was awarded an honorary CBE in recognition of his valuable services to literature.

Fools of Fortune won the Whitbread Award for the Best Novel of 1983. It has received considerable critical acclaim: the Daily Telegraph called it ‘a sad book … written with wisdom, delicate comedy, and a sweet, beguiling nostalgia for what could have been. And throughout, a sense of gentle, philosophical resignation eases the sadness’; Philip Howard in The Times wrote, ‘a beautiful, affectionate and humorous, as well as a terrible story … William Trevor at his best’; the New Statesman commented, ‘a fine piece of work … it communicates something authentic: a sense of melancholy; yet a complicated one, not without hope—a view of real people in a real world’; Melvyn Bragg in Punch thought it a ‘supremely well achieved and absorbing novel’—and Molly Keane, author of Good Behaviour, called it ‘a wonderfully moving and important book’.