Best Selling Books by Colm Toibin

From the author of "The Master" comes a moving novel about a young immigrant in 1950''s Brooklyn who is torn between her Irish roots and the man who wins her heart.

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by LitHub and The Millions! From one of the most engaging and brilliant writers of our time comes a “not to be missed” (LitHub) collection of eleven essays about growing up in Ireland during radical change; about cancer, priests, popes, homosexuality, and literature. “IT ALL STARTED WITH MY BALLS.” So begins Colm Tóibín’s fabulously compelling essay, laced with humor, about his diagnosis and treatment for cancer. Tóibín survives, but he has entered, as he says, “the age of one ball.” The second essay in this seductive collection is a memoir about growing up in the 1950s and ’60s in the small town of Enniscorthy in County Wexford, the setting for many of Tóibín’s novels and stories, including Brooklyn, The Blackwater Lightship, and Nora Webster. Tóibín describes his education by priests, several of whom were condemned years later for abuse. He writes about Irish history and literature, and about the long, tragic journey toward legal and social acceptance of homosexuality. In Part Two, Tóibín profiles three complex and vexing popes—John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis. And in Part Three, he writes about a trio of authors who reckon with religion in their fiction. The final essay, “Alone in Venice,” is a gorgeous account of Tóibín’s journey, at the height of the pandemic, to the beloved city where he has set some of his most dazzling scenes. The streets, canals, churches, and museums were empty. He had them to himself, an experience both haunting and exhilarating. “A tantalizing glimpse into Tóibín’s full fictional powers,” (The Sunday Times, London) A Guest at the Feast is both an intimate encounter with a supremely creative artist and a glorious celebration of writing.

"Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony''s parents, a huge extended family that lives and works, eats and plays together. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis, now in her forties with two teenage children, has no one to rely on in this still-new country. Though her ties to the town in Ireland where she grew up remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades. One day, when Tony is at his job, an Irishman comes to the door asking for her by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony''s child, and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but instead will deposit it on Eilis''s doorstep. It is what Eilis does - and what she refuses to do - in response to this stunning news that makes Tâoibâin''s novel so riveting. Long Island is about longings unfulfilled, even unrecognized. The silences in Eilis''s life are thunderous and dangerous, and there''s no one defter than Tâoibâin at giving them language. This is a gorgeous story of a woman alone in a marriage and the deepest of bonds she rekindles on her return to the place and people she left behind, to ways of living and loving she thought she''d lost. Eilis is perhaps Tâoibâin''s most moving and unforgettable character, and this novel is a masterpiece"--

"A retelling of the story of Clytemnestra and her children from Greek mythology"--

From the author of The Master and Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín weaves together the lives of three generations of estranged women as they reunite to witness and mourn the death of a brother, a son, and a grandson. It is Ireland in the early 1990s. Helen, her mother, Lily, and her grandmother, Dora, have come together to tend to Helen''s brother, Declan, who is dying of AIDS. With Declan''s two friends, the six of them are forced to plumb the shoals of their own histories and to come to terms with each other.u200b Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Blackwater Lightship is a deeply resonant story about three generations of an estranged family reuniting to mourn an untimely death. In spare, luminous prose, Colm Tóibín explores the nature of love and the complex emotions inside a family at war with itself. Hailed as "a genuine work of art" (Chicago Tribune), this is a novel about the capacity of stories to heal the deepest wounds.

In Love in a Dark Time, Colm Tóibín appraises the life and work of nine highly influential writers and artists of the 19th and 20th centuries. These were figures for whom being gay seemed to come second in their public lives, either by choice or by necessity – but in their private lives, in their own spirit, the laws of desire changed everything. From Oscar Wilde, born in the 1850s, to Pedro Almodovar, born a hundred years later, this book studies how a changing world altered gay lives in ways both subtle and profound. Tóibín is drawn with sympathetic fascination to each of his subjects: to Elizabeth Bishop and her artistic triumph over her demons; to James Baldwin, whose own agent advised him to burn the manuscript for Giovanni’s Room; to Francis Bacon for his refusal to play the role of the “tragic queer”; to unlovable Thomas Mann, victim of his biographers. Colm Tóibín interweaves close reading of the artist’s work with detailed analysis of the personality behind it to illuminating effect.

A New York Times Notable Book, Critic’s Top Pick, and Top Ten Book of Historical Fiction Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, NPR, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg Businessweek u200bFrom one of today’s most brilliant and beloved novelists, a dazzling, epic family saga set across a half-century spanning World War I, the rise of Hitler, World War II, and the Cold War that is “a feat of literary sorcery in its own right” (Oprah Daily). The Magician opens in a provincial German city at the turn of the twentieth century, where the boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative father, bound by propriety, and a Brazilian mother, alluring and unpredictable. Young Mann hides his artistic aspirations from his father and his homosexual desires from everyone. He is infatuated with one of the richest, most cultured Jewish families in Munich, and marries the daughter Katia. They have six children. On a holiday in Italy, he longs for a boy he sees on a beach and writes the story Death in Venice. He is the most successful novelist of his time, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, a public man whose private life remains secret. He is expected to lead the condemnation of Hitler, whom he underestimates. His oldest daughter and son, leaders of Bohemianism and of the anti-Nazi movement, share lovers. He flees Germany for Switzerland, France and, ultimately, America, living first in Princeton and then in Los Angeles. In this “exquisitely sensitive” (The Wall Street Journal) novel, Tóibín has crafted “a complex but empathetic portrayal of a writer in a lifelong battle against his innermost desires, his family, and the tumultuous times they endure” (Time), and “you’ll find yourself savoring every page” (Vogue).

Presents a fictionalized study based upon the many biographical materials and family accounts of nineteenth-century novelist Henry James and examines his life of loneliness, despair, and failed relationships.

From the award-winning author of Brooklyn and The Master, a powerful, brave, and moving novel set in Argentina. In Argentina, in the time of the Generals, the streets are empty at night, and people have trained themselves not to see. Richard Garay lives with his mother, hiding his sexuality from her and from society. Stifled by his job, Richard is willing to take chances, both sexually and professionally. But Argentina is changing, and as his country edges toward peace, Richard tentatively begins a love affair. The result is a powerful, brave, and poignant novel of sex, death, and the difficulties of connecting one''s inner life with the outside world.

A provocative imagining of the later years of the mother of Jesus finds her living a solitary existence in Ephesus years after her son''s crucifixion and struggling with guilt, anger, and feelings that her son is not the son of God and that His sacrifice was not for a worthy cause.

Available for the first time in a beautiful standalone edition, one of Colm Tóibín’s finest short stories and “the most striking example of Tóibin’s emotional control” (The Guardian), “A Long Winter,” is set in the mountains of Catalonia in Spain—includes a new afterword by the author on how he came to write the story. A young man named Miquel returns to his family in the Catalan Pyrenees upon completing his military service. His younger brother, Jordi, will be departing for his service a week after Miquel’s arrival. He will be gone for two years. Miquel notices their mother’s increasingly erratic behavior and understands that she is drinking. As she becomes increasingly unstable, her husband resorts to drastic measures. Unable to abide his betrayal and her own grief, she walks off into the mountains. A blizzard sets in and the search for her is futile. No one will find her until the spring thaw arrives. A gorgeous story of loss, grief, and longing, “A Long Winter” describes an extraordinary bond between a mother and son and a haunting portrait of a family in crisis. Tóibín’s powers of imagination and transfixing emotional insight are on full display.

From the multiple award-winning author of The Master and Brooklyn, an illuminating look at Irish culture, history, and literature through the lives of the fathers of three of Ireland’s greatest writers—Oscar Wilde''s father, William Butler Yeats''s father, and James Joyce''s father—“Thrilling, wise, and resonant, this book aptly unites Tóibín’s novelistic gifts for psychology and emotional nuance with his talents as a reader and critic, in incomparably elegant prose” (The New York Times Book Review). Colm Tóibín begins his incisive, revelatory Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know with a walk through the Dublin streets where he went to university and where three Irish literary giants came of age. Oscar Wilde, writing about his relationship with his father stated: “Whenever there is hatred between two people there is bond or brotherhood of some kind…you loathed each other not because you were so different but because you were so alike.” W.B. Yeats wrote of his father, a painter: “It is this infirmity of will which has prevented him from finishing his pictures. The qualities I think necessary to success in art or life seemed to him egotism.” James’s father was perhaps the most quintessentially Irish, widely loved, garrulous, a singer, and drinker with a volatile temper, who drove his son from Ireland. “An entertaining and revelatory book about the vexed relationships between these three pairs of difficult fathers and their difficult sons” (The Wall Street Journal), Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know illustrates the surprising ways these fathers surface in the work of their sons. “As charming as [they are] illuminating, these stories of fathers and sons provide a singular look at an extraordiu00adnary confluence of genius” (Bookpage). Tóibín recounts the resistance to English cultural domination, the birth of modern Irish cultural identity, and the extraordinary contributions of these complex and masterful authors. “This immersive book holds literary scholarship to be a heartfelt, heavenly pursuit” (The Washington Post).

With dazzling brilliance and empathy, Colm Tóibín''s collection of stories wrestles with complicated themes of emotional restraint, the long reach of sexual repression, and the difficulty of escaping one''s past. Each of the nine stories in this beautifully written, intensely intimate collection centers on a transformative moment that alters the delicate balance of power between mother and son, or changes the way they perceive one another. With exquisite grace and eloquence, Tóibín writes of men and women bound by convention, by unspoken emotions, by the stronghold of the past. Many are trapped in lives they would not choose again, if they ever chose at all. A man buries his mother and converts his grief to desire in one night. A famous singer captivates an audience, yet cannot beguile her own estranged son. And in "A Long Winter," Colm Tóibín''s finest piece of fiction to date, a young man searches for his mother in the snow-covered mountains where she has sought escape from the husband who controls and confines her. Winner of numerous awards for his fifth novel, The Master—including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award—Tóibín brings to this stunning first collection an acute understanding of human frailty and longing. These are haunting, profoundly moving stories by a writer who is himself a master.

Widowed in her forties, with four children and not enough money, Nora has lost the love of her life, Maurice, the man who rescued her from the stifling world to which she was born. And now she fears she may be drawn back into it. Wounded, strong-willed, clinging to secrecy in a tiny community where everyone knows your business, Nora is drowning in her own sorrow and blind to the suffering of her young sons, who have lost their father. Yet she has moments of stunning empathy and kindness, and when she begins to sing again, after decades, she finds solace, engagement, a haven-- herself.

Colm Tóibín’s “lovely, understated” novel that “proceeds with stately grace” (The Washington Post Book World) about an uncompromising judge whose principles, when brought home to his own family, are tragic. Eamon Redmond is a judge in Ireland’s high court, a completely legal creature who is just beginning to discover how painfully unconnected he is from other human beings. With effortless fluency, Colm Tóibín reconstructs the history of Eamon’s relationships—with his father, his first “girl,” his wife, and the children who barely know him—and he writes about Eamon’s affection for the Irish coast with such painterly skill that the land itself becomes a character. The result is a novel of stunning power, “seductive and absorbing” (USA Today).

In his essay on Tennessee Williams, the author reveals an artist profoundly tormented by his sister''s mental illness. Through the relationship between W.B. Yeats and his father, he examines a world of family relations, and in Roddy Doyle''s writing on his parents illuminates an Ireland reinvented. From John Cheever''s journals he makes flesh this darkly comic misanthrope and his intimates. Educating an intellectual woman, Cheever remarked, is like letting a rattlesnake into the house. In pieces that range from the importance of aunts (and the death of parents) in the English nineteenth-century novel to the relationship between fathers and sons in the writing of James Baldwin and Barack Obama, the author illuminates the intimate connections between writers and their families, but also articulates the great joy of reading their work.

In 1950 Katherine Proctor leaves Ireland for Barcelona, determined to escape her family and become a painter. There she meets Miguel, an anarchist veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and begins to build a life with him. But Katherine cannot escape her past, as Michael Graves, a fellow Irish emigre in Spain, forces her to reexamine all her relationships: to her lover, her art, and the homeland she only thought she knew.

From Colm Tóibín, “one of the world’s best living literary writers” (The Boston Globe), comes a brilliant collection of nine short stories, many never-before-published, set across Ireland, Spain, and America—about the complexities of family, longing, loss, and love. Celebrated as “his generation’s most gifted writer of love’s complicated, contradictory power” (Los Angeles Times), Colm Tóibín is a master of short fiction as well as the novel, able to summon an extraordinary intensity of emotion in a brief tale. The eleven stories transport readers across continents and eras. In “The Journey to Galway,” a mother who has learned of the death of her son, a fighter pilot in World War I, travels to Galway to inform his wife and their three now fatherless children. “Sleep,” originally published in The New Yorker, explores the rift between two lovers as one of them cannot reckon with his grief and fear after the death of his brother. Death, again, is a central character in the title story, “The News from Dublin,” as Maurice Webster travels to Dublin to try to save his younger brother who is dying of tuberculosis. Maurice must petition the health minister for access to a new experimental drug, and this is the only hope. Tóibín’s stories are rich with the complexities of family dynamics, the haunting pull of the past, and the quiet revelations that define our lives. His characters, whether navigating the aftermath of war, or forbidden love, or the desires of a girl in Catalan, or the quiet struggles mundane life, are rendered with illuminating, unforgettable empathy and insight. The News from Dublin is an exquisite introduction to Tóibín’s short fiction for new readers who may have discovered Tóibín with the publication of Long Island, and a glorious new collection for longtime fans of this “achingly beautiful writer…with infinite compassion” (The Miami Herald).