Description
Felicia's Journey is a simple tale told with a subtle complexity. Felicia is an Irish country girl who has come to England to look for her jilted lover. Hilditch is a mild-mannered, gentle psychopath who lures the helpless Felicia into his trap. Interestingly, we see the story from each character's eyes when they are separate, but from Hilditch's view when they are together. It is an unusual and effective device that distorts the perspective and adds texture to a classic story. Trevor won a Whitbread Prize in 1994 for Felicia's Journey . From Publishers Weekly Trevor's artfully suspenseful tale of a naive and pregnant young Irishwoman's encounter with a disturbed factory manager spent four weeks on PW's bestseller list. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. "A page-turner marked by brilliant psychological suspense." — The Philadelphia Inquirer "Felicia's Journey is packed with extraordinary passages." — Time "A battle for the soul, waged between the forces of good and evil . . . Mr. Trevor shows just how wise and wry and funny and morally astute an observer of the human comedy he is." —Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review "A thriller lifted to the level of high art . . ." — Publishers Weekly "In thirteen novels and eight short-story collections [William Trevor] has shown himself a close observer, a fine stylist, a master psychologist. In Felicia's Journey . . . he brings all these qualities into play, and adds to them a teasing manipulation of the reader's sensibilities, so that the book has the elegant tensions of a high-class thriller." — The New York Review of Books "One of the very best writers of our era." — The Washington Post Book World William Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork, and spent his childhood in provincial Ireland. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin. Hexa0is the author of twenty-nine books, including Felicia’s Journey , which won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and was made into a motion picture, and The Story of Lucy Gault, which was shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Whitbread Fiction Prize.xa0In 1996 he was the recipient of the Lannan Award for Fiction. In 2001, he won the Irish Times Literature Prize for fiction. Two of his books were chosen by The New York Times as best books of the year, and his short stories appeared regularly in the New Yorker. In 1997, he was named Honorary Commander of the British Empire. Read more
Features & Highlights
- "Perfectly executed and chilling... a sad and oddly moving tale of lost opportunities and misplaced hopes."
- "
- —The New York Times
- “Trevor was our twentieth century Chekov."
- —Wall Street Journal
- Felicia is unmarried, pregnant, and penniless. She steals away from a small Irish town and drifts through the industrial English Midlands, searching for the boyfriend who left her. Instead she meets up with the fat, fiftyish, unfailingly reasonable Mr. Hilditch, who is looking for a new friend to join the five other girls in his Memory Lane. But the strange, sad, terrifying tricks of chance unravel both his and Felicia's delusions in a story that will magnetize fans of Alfred Hitchcock and Ruth Rendell even as it resonates with William Trevor's own "impeccable strength and piercing profundity" (
- The Washington Post Book World
- ).
