Reading Turgenev: Play

Reading Turgenev is one of William Trevor’s finest novels. A Booker Award nominee, it was published in 1991. The book focuses on the ‘shrinking community’ of Protestant families in a 50s provincial town. Like the Russian gentry Turgenev wrote about, the Irish Protestants are an ever-decreasing minority in an increasingly Catholic Ireland, who have lost their direction and purpose. The novel and play concentrate on the deadly social world Mary Louise Dallon inhabits and the rich and often fantastic world to which she retreats.