Nine-year-old Lucy Gault is devastated when her parents plan to leave their ancestral estate in Ireland for a new home in England. As the servants are let go and the house is boarded up, Lucy decides to run away. But her disappearance sets off a series of misunderstandings that will change her family forever and will touch each inhabitant of her village.

A modern master of the short story brings his precise and compassionate observations to bear on his own life, in a book of recollections that is at once funny, poignant, and revealing. As William Trevor records his migration from the shabby-genteel precincts of Ireland's Protestant middle-class to the sleek vulgarity of London in the swinging sixties, from Cork and Dublin to New York and Isfahan, he yields luminous portraits of the people whose paths...

Collects forty-eight short stories by the author that span more than half a century that illuminate the human condition.