Eyes and Ears

• The Silence in the Garden by William Trevor
  Bodley Head, 204 pp, £9.95, June 1988, ISBN 0 370 31218 X
• Sea Music by David Profumo
  Secker, 207 pp, £10.95, May 1988, ISBN 0 436 38714 X
• Tell it me again by John Fuller
  Chatto, 202 pp, £10.95, April 1988, ISBN 0 7011 3288 4
• The Continuing Silence of a Poet: The Collected Short Stories of A.B. Yehoshua
  Peter Halban/Weidenfeld, 377 pp, £11.95, June 1988, ISBN 1 870015 14 2

The innocent child, eavesdropping on adults and adulteries, puzzled by half-heard conversations and half-understood hints, has a respectable history in fiction: What Maisie knew, The Go-Between, many other novels and stories. Such children are at the centre of William Trevor’s tenth novel and David Profumo’s first; or rather, Trevor seems to have chosen to place young Tom both centrally and peripherally (as children often are, in fiction and in life), while Profumo makes young James the very eyes and ears of his book, though distancing him by telling the tale in the third person.