This book collects, for the first time, Colm Toibin's critical essays on Henry James. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel about James's life, The Master, Toibin brilliantly analyzes James from a novelist's point of view. Known for his acuity and originality, Toibin is himself a master o[...]

Colm Toibin's "Brooklyn" is a devastating story of love, loss and one woman's terrible choice between duty and personal freedom. It is Ireland in the early 1950s and for Eilis Lacey, as for so many young Irish girls, opportunities are scarce. So when her sister arranges for her to emigrate to New Yo[...]

In the captivating stories that make up "The Empty Family" Colm Toibin delineates with a tender and unique sensibility lives of unspoken or unconscious longing, of individuals, often willingly, cast adrift from their history. 'I imagined lamplight, shadows, soft voices, clothes put away, the low sou[...]

This collection of prefaces, originally written for the 1909 multivolume "New York" Edition of Henry James' fiction, first appeared in book form in 1934 with an introduction by poet and critic R. P. Blackmur. In his prefaces, James tackles the great problems of fiction writing - character, plot, poi[...]

Eamon Redmond is a judge in Ireland's high court, a man remote from his wife, his son and daughter and, at least outwardly, from his own childhood. The life he has built for himself, between his work in Dublin and his family's retreat by the sea at Cush, is distinguished by order and by achievement.[...]

Richard Garay lives alone with his mother, hiding his sexuality from her and from those around him. Stifled by a job he despises, he finds himself willing to take considerable risks. Set in Argentina in a time of great change, The Story of the Night is a powerful and moving novel about a man who, as[...]

'This is the most astonishing piece of writing, lyrical in its emotion and spare in its construction ...Toibin has crafted an unmissable read' Sunday Herald In Blackwater in the early 1990s, three women -- Dora Devereux, her daughter Lily and her granddaughter Helen -- have come together after years[...]

"Mothers and Sons" is a sensitive and beautifully written meditation on the dramas surrounding this most elemental of relationships. Psychologically intricate and emotionally incisive, each finely wrought story teases out the delicate and difficult strands woven between mothers and sons. This is an [...]

In Love in a Dark Time, Colm Toibin looks at the life and work of some of the greatest and most influential artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His subjects range from figures such as Oscar Wilde, born in the 1850s, to Pedro Almodovar, born nearly a hundred years later. Toibin studies[...]

This is longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013. Colm Toibin's The Testament of Mary is a short, powerful novel about one of the most famous mothers in history. From the author of Brooklyn, in a voice that is both tender and filled with rage, The Testament of Mary tells the story of a cataclysmic e[...]

Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabea, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabea loves movies, Coca-Colas, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn M[...]