Colm Tóibín

A novel of enormous wit and profound emotional resonance from one of the world's finest writers. Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighbouring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony's parents. It is the spring of...

Tóibín's most beautifully executed novel to date – The Times Literary Supplement Young Eilis Lacey dreams of life beyond the confines of her tiny Irish village, but unlike her beautiful sister, Rose, Eilis' gifts are of a more practical nature: she has a head for numbers and is a loving and dutiful daughter. Yet her ambition cannot be hidden and...

In January 1895, Henry James anticipates the opening of his first play, Guy Domville, in London. The production fails, and he returns, chastened and humiliated, to his writing desk. The result is a string of masterpieces, but they are produced at a high personal cost. In The Master, Colm Tóibín captures the exquisite anguish of a man who circulated in...

OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Stunning." --People "Dazzling yet devastating...Tóibín is simply one of the world's best living literary writers." --The Boston Globe "Momentous and hugely affecting." --The Wall Street Journal * From the beloved, critically acclaimed, bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving novel featuring Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín's most...

Colm Tóibín's personal account of encountering James Baldwin's work, published in Baldwin's centenary year. Acclaimed Irish novelist Colm Tóibín first read James Baldwin just after turning eighteen. He had completed his first year at an Irish university and was struggling to free himself from a religious upbringing. He had even considered entering a seminary and was searching for literature that...

Follow Colm Tóibín's lone religious pilgrimage along the Irish border during the tumultuous summer of 1987. In the summer after the Anglo-Irish Agreement, when tension was high in Northern Ireland, Colm Tóibín walked along the border from Derry to Newry. Bad Blood is a stark and evocative account of this journey through fear and hatred, and a report on ordinary...

Homage to Barcelona by Colm Tóibín celebrates one of Europe's greatest cities—a cosmopolitan hub of vibrant architecture, art, culture, and nightlife. It moves from the story of the city's founding and its huge expansion in the nineteenth century to the lives of Gaudí, Miró, Picasso, Casals, and Dalí. It also explores the history of Catalan nationalism, the tragedy of the...

In The News From Dublin, a beautiful collection of short stories from the bestselling author of Brooklyn and Long Island, Colm Tóibín delves into the days and nights of those living far from home. A woman in Galway hears of the death of her son in the First World War. An Irishman seeks anonymity in Barcelona, haunted by crimes he...

Part travelogue, part reportage, part autobiography, The Sign of the Cross is the story of Colm Tóibín's religious pilgrimage across Europe. Between 1990 and 1994, Colm Tóibín made a series of trips through Catholic Europe. His journey led him into close contact with people from all walks of life, from priests to politicians, from the intellectually open to the spiritually...

Colm Tóibín's New York Times bestselling novel—now an acclaimed film starring Saoirse Ronan and Jim Broadbent, nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Picture—is "a moving, deeply satisfying read" (Entertainment Weekly) about a young Irish immigrant in Brooklyn in the early 1950s. "One of the most unforgettable characters in contemporary literature" (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), Eilis Lacey has come of age in...

Published as a standalone novel for the first time, A Long Winter is a psychologically intricate and emotionally devastating story from the bestselling author of Brooklyn and Long Island. One snowy morning, after an argument with her husband, Miquel's mother departs from their village high up in the Pyrenees and disappears. With his younger brother stationed far away on military...

In Love in a Dark Time, Colm Tóibín examines the life and work of some of the greatest and most influential artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Linked by the common thread of their sexualities, his subjects range from figures such as Oscar Wilde, born in the 1850s, to Pedro Almodóvar, born nearly a hundred years later. Tóibín explores...

Miquel and his father are living an uneasy life together in his mother's house in the Pyrenees, the house she had been returning to on the day she died. A new bridge, connecting the two valleys, is almost complete, which will end the valley's isolation and create an easier route to smuggle contraband deep into the mountains. Where Miquel's father...

When an Irishman knocks on Eilis Fiorello's door on Long Island, the news he brings looks set to jeopardise the stability of the family life she and her husband Tony have built together. The arrival of this stranger will send Eilis back to Ireland and to the people she had left behind twenty years earlier. Did she make the wrong...

A Guest at the Feast uncovers the places where politics and poetics meet, where life and fiction overlap, where one can be inside writing and also outside of it. From the melancholy and amusement within the work of the writer John McGahern to an extraordinary essay on his own cancer diagnosis, Tóibín delineates the bleakness and strangeness of life and...

Nora Webster was shortlisted for the 2015 Folio Prize. This heartbreaking new novel is from the author of Brooklyn. "This is his best yet," declares the Spectator, Books of the Year. "So rich, so observant, so moving," says the Observer, Books of the Year. "A fine companion piece to his acclaimed novel, Brooklyn... Subtle and enthralling," remarks the Sunday Times,...

Set in Ireland in the 1990s, Colm Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship tells the story of the Devereux family. Dora Devereux, her daughter Lily, and her granddaughter Helen have come together after years of strife and reached an uneasy truce. Helen's adored brother, Declan, is dying. Two friends join him and the women in a crumbling old house by the sea,...

The Heather Blazing by Colm Tóibín details the life of Eamon Redmond, a judge in Ireland's high court. He is 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...

As with everything Colm Tóibín sets his masterful hand to, The Magician is a great imaginative achievement - immensely readable, erudite, worldly and knowing, and fully realized. - Richard Ford When the Great War breaks out in 1914, Thomas Mann, like so many of his fellow countrymen, is fired up with patriotism. He imagines the Germany of great literature and...

A classic work of Irish literature, this award-winning novel is an exploration of love, art and identity. This was the night train to Barcelona, some hours before the dawn. This was 1950, late September. I had left my husband. I had left my home. Katherine Proctor has dared to leave her family in Ireland and reach out for a new...

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 the Falklands War is...

"All my life I have loved the Sabbath." So begins Colm Toibin's devastating novella The Testament of Mary. My son was wearing rich clothes and he was moving as though the clothes belonged to him as of right... I held him to me and I whispered: "You are in great danger. You are being watched"... Even before I had finished...

In this book, novelist Colm Tóibín offers a deeply personal introduction to the work and life of one of his most important literary influences, the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Ranging across her poetry, prose, letters, and biography, Tóibín creates a vivid picture of Bishop while also revealing how her work has helped shape his sensibility as a novelist and how...

In this book, novelist Colm Tóibín offers a deeply personal introduction to the work and life of one of his most important literary influences, the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Ranging across her poetry, prose, letters, and biography, Tóibín creates a vivid picture of Bishop while also revealing how her work has helped shape his sensibility as a novelist and how...