NBCC members and finalists and winners of our book award were eligible to vote in the winter edition of the NBCC’s Good Reads. Here’s what former NBCC fiction finalist David Leavitt recommended and why:
I’ve always loved William Trevor’s stories. Each collection seems to outdo the one that precedes it. In Cheating at Canasta the stories are set, mostly, in Ireland and England, and are as remarkable for the variousness of their subject matter as for their elegance. In all of them Trevor displays the empathy for human suffering that is his great gift. My favorites are probably “An Afternoon,” about a troubled teenage girl meeting up with a much older man she has met on a telephone chat line, and “Old Flame,” in which one elderly woman urges her closest friend to perpetuate an affair for years after it should have ended.
An essential book.
—David Leavitt