Two Lives, William Trevor (Viking Penguin, 1991) ***

This book, which was nominated for the Booker Award, is in fact two separate novels, even though it was published under the single title of Two Lives. The separate novels are Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria. What they have in common is that they are the stories of two womaen, each marked by the loss or absence of love, who escape into literature.

In Reading Turgenev, an Irish country girl Mary Dallon is pressured into a loveless marriage with a shopkeeper twice her age in a nearby village. He lives above the shop with his two sisters who disapprove of his new wife. Unable to consummate the marriage, he begins to drink and his sisters make Mary's life even more miserable. She falls in love with a sickly cousin who reads her Russian novels during their secret meetings. When he dies, she is institutionalized for 'madness' when it appears that she might be attempting to poison the sisters and the husband she does not love. There's a surprise ending which seems to even things up a bit.

The second novel is set in Italy, where Emily Delahunty, a woman who was abused in childhood and later became a prostitute now writes formula romance novels in a countryside villa, which she rents out as a pension. She is injured while riding in a train bombed by terrorists and befriends the other survivors of the explosion while recovering in the hospital. They all move to her pension to convalesce and a number of surprises soon develop.

I much preferred the first story, but each one entertains because Trevor has pulled you into the story and made you care about his characters.