It was in 1996 when I read a glowing review in the Globe and Mail on what was at the time William Trevor’s latest collection of stories, After Rain. Already a fan of short fiction, I ran out, got the hard cover, and devoured it. That collection, which I still have and still refer to from time to time, contains some of what I consider to be Trevor’s finest stories: “A Friendship,” “Timothy’s Birthday,” “A Bit of Business,” “Gilbert’s Mother,” and “Lost Ground.” Since then I have gone on to read the rest of Trevor’s short fiction (of which there is a prodigious amount), everything he’s written before and since, thus beginning a life-long admiration for a man who, until his death in 2016, was widely considered one of the greatest living short story writers in English. So when I recently learned of the posthumously published Last Stories, I immediately ordered it online.