In a wild but believable misapprehension, the Gaults conclude that she has drowned. But 9-year-old Lucy, hoping to change her parents' minds, decides to run away. Expecting revenge, Gault at last prepares to take his wife and daughter into exile. ''Everywhere,'' remarks Henry, a devoted family retainer, ''what you heard about was the going.'' After the Gaults' sheepdogs are poisoned, the captain, standing guard in the night, repels some would-be arsonists with a warning shot that accidentally wounds one of them in the shoulder.

His latest novel, ''The Story of Lucy Gault,'' blends national and private heartache, somewhat in the manner of his earlier ''Fools of Fortune.'' The new book spans the history of Irish independence, opening in 1921 and closing when the people of a town the author calls Enniseala, in County Cork, can ''walk about the streets chatting on the telephone.'' If Trevor fails to astonish us with the plausible way he makes 80 years pass in little more than 200 pages, that is only because he has spoiled us by doing this kind of thing so convincingly and often.ĭuring Ireland's violent year of partition, Captain Everard Gault and his English wife, Heloise, are the besieged owners of Lahardane, one of the Protestant ''Big Houses'' then being reluctantly abandoned. Trevor moves between the short story and the novel Irish settings and English the capitalized Troubles of his native land and the personal lowercase ones of his characters. His deep, steady literary achievement, in two dozen books of fiction, has come from a series of regular alternations, as natural to him as walking with his left and right feet.

The story of lucy gault reviews