The two lives of the title are brilliantly illuminated in a pair of short novels, Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria, that exemplify the biting, tragicomic work of this Anglo-Irish master. The first novel is a sorrowful love story, the second a sort of thriller. Each of Trevor"s two heroines is trapped in her life, one in Ireland and the other in Italy, and each has some experience of the transformational power of literature, a subject the author knows at first hand. Nobody can break your heart with such laconic precision. To be read with handkerchief in hand.