William Trevor, whose mournful, sometimes darkly funny short stories and novels about the small struggles of unremarkable people placed him in the company of masters like V. S. Pritchett, W. Somerset Maugham and Chekhov, died on Sunday in Somerset, England. He was 88.

His death was confirmed by his son Patrick Cox.

Mr. Trevor, who was Irish by birth and upbringing but a longtime resident of Britain, placed his fiction squarely in the middle of ordinary life. His plots often unfolded in Irish or English villages whose inhabitants, most of them hanging on to the bottom rung of the lower middle class, waged unequal battle with capricious fate.

In “The Ballroom of Romance,” one of his most famous stories, a young woman caring for her crippled father looks for love in a dance hall but settles, week after week, for a few drunken kisses from a local bachelor. The hero of “The Day We Got Drunk on Cake” repeatedly phones a young woman he admires in between drinking sessions at a series of pubs. The relationship deepens and, during a final call in the wee hours, takes a sudden, unexpected turn.

The emotional weather in Mr. Trevor’s world is generally overcast, with a threat of rain. “I am a 58-year-old provincial,” the narrator of the novel “Nights at the Alexandra” (1987) begins. “I have no children. I have never married.” From this bleak premise, a mesmerizing tale unfolds.