This new novel, except for the accidents that took Mrs. Connulty’s husband and Dillahan’s first wife, is a delicate sort of drama — there is no corpse in the basement, no bomb lies hidden in any drawer — but even so, a reader will have his heart in his mouth for the last 50 pages. And when that heart settles back down, it will be broken and satisfied.

Love and Summer is a short novel that comes as close to perfection as may be possible. The publishers have priced it high, sensibly judging that good readers will need no financial inducement – no stickers blazoning "£4 off", no "3 for 2" nonsense – to be persuaded to buy the book.

The setting is characteristic Trevor: a small town somewhere in the Irish Midlands, one in which so little unusual happens that the appearance of a stranger with a camera and a bicycle provokes comment and speculation. Florian Kilderry is "the sole relic of an Italian mother and an Anglo-Irish father, a couple whose devotion to one another had illuminated a marriage in which their foibles were indulged and their creditors charmed as part of everyday life."

There is a touch of JD Salinger about William Trevor - except, of course, that Trevor publishes faithfully every few years: novels and collections of stories. He is 81 years old. His last short-story collection, Cheating at Canasta, began, as Roy Foster pointed out, with a masterpiece. "How does Trevor do it?" was Foster's marvelling question. How does he do it? Mysteriously. This vexed, misused and secret word also applies to his new novel, Love and Summer (a title that sings back to an earlier book, Death in Summer). His new work is all about life, and if there are dampers and de-accelerants on that life, it is nevertheless a fabulously benign book - almost, I might say, a work of sympathetic magic, as if to describe a troubled utopia might be to instate it.