The Empty Family (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781439195963)

On the heels of his bestselling and award-winning novel Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín returns with a stunning collection of stories--"a book that's both a perfect introduction to Tóibín and, for longtime fans, a bracing pleasure" ( The Seattle Times ).Critics praised Brooklyn as a "beautifully rendered portrait of Brooklyn and provincial Ireland in the 1950s." In The Empty Family, Tóibín has extended his imagination further, offering an incredible range of periods and characters--people linked by love, loneliness, desire--"the unvarying dilemmas of the human heart" ( The Observer, UK). In the breathtaking long story "The Street," Tóibín imagines a relationship between Pakistani workers in Barcelona--a taboo affair in a community ruled by obedience and silence. In "Two Women," an eminent and taciturn Irish set designer takes a job in her homeland and must confront emotions she has long repressed. "Silence" is a brilliant historical set piece about Lady Gregory, who tells the writer Henry James a confessional story at a dinner party. The Empty Family will further cement Tóibín's status as "his generation's most gifted writer of love's complicated, contradictory power" ( Los Angeles Times ).

Author: Colm Toibin
ISBN-10: 143919596X
ISBN-13: 9781439195963
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Language: English
Published: 01/03/2012
Pages: 288
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.52lbs
Size: 8.04h x 5.28w x 0.65d

Review Citation(s):
New York Times Book Review 01/29/2012 pg. 28

About the Author
Colm Tóibín is the author of ten novels, including The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; The Testament of Mary; and Nora Webster, as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. Three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York.