Books/PapThe Hill Bachelors by William Trevor (Penguin, £6.99 in UK)erbacks

Trevor's first collection in four years follows possibly his finest, After Rain (1996), and true to his art, the master does not disappoint. Irish stories dominate and the wonder remains as to the variety, range and accuracy of the unsentimentalised Ireland he evokes. Throughout his calm, dangerous stories, he makes the ordinary and familiar new and shocking. His merging of the sinister with the simply seedy explores the petty tragedy of small lives such as in 'Against the Odds': "Mrs Kincaid decided to lie low. There had been a bit of bother, nothing much but enough to cause her to change her address". 'Of the Cloth' is a moving portrait of a local rector out of touch "with his own country and what it had become". The superb title story about a young man's return to the remote family farm where his widowed mother lives alone is a stark family portrait as well as a chapter of Irish social history as exact and subtle as McGahern's.