Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín's Lady Gregory's Toothbrush is a beautiful insight into the life of outspoken Irishwoman, Augusta Gregory.A remarkable figure in Celtic history, she was married to an MP and land-owner, yet retained an unprecedented independence of both thought and deed, actively championing causes close to her heart. At once conservative and radical in her beliefs, she saw no conflict in idealizing and mythologizing the Irish peasantry, for example, while her landlord husband introduced legislation that would, in part, lead to the widespread misery, poverty and starvation of the Great Famine. Nevertheless, as founder of the Abbey Theatre, an outspoken opponent of censorship, and mentor, muse, and mother-figure to W. B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory played a pivotal role in shaping Irish literary and dramatic history. Moreover, despite her parents’ early predictions of spinsterhood, she was no matronly figure, engaging in a passionate affair while newly-wedded and, as she approached sixty, falling for a man almost twenty years her junior.

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Long Island The bridge connecting the two valleys was almost built. 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 imagines opportunity, Miquel foresees disaster and an exposure to the outside world for which his father is desperately unprepared. Colm Tóibín's exhilarating short novel contains vast inner and outer worlds within its pages. With meticulous precision and an unerring eye Toibin captures lives caught between the past and the present, and the journey of a young man seeking connection, haunted by loss.

An unforgettable story about loss and new love from the bestselling author of Brooklyn and Long Island. ‘The most striking example of Tóibín’s emotional control . . . [An] eloquent expression of the bond between a mother and a son’ – The Guardian One snowy morning, after arguing with her husband, Miquel’s mother walks out from their home high up in the Pyrenees and does not return. With his younger brother stationed far away on military service and his father cast out by the people of the town, Miquel and his father are left to fend for themselves. Together they will be forced to battle the elements, and their resentment of each other, through the long winter. Miquel’s desperate searching for his mother is only interrupted when Manolo, an orphaned servant boy from the next village, arrives to help out in the house. As Miquel is forced to confront the reality of his mother’s absence, Manolo, with his silences and longing gaze, offers the promise of new love, and another kind of life. ‘A Long Winter evokes loss, loneliness, guilt and survival in a few masterly strokes’ – Independent

Kauan kaivattua jatkoa Brooklynille! Colm Tóibínin rakastetuimman sankarittaren tarina jatkuu. Long Island on herkkävireinen romaani salaisuuksista, kaipuusta ja rakkaudesta. On kulunut kaksi vuosikymmentä, ja Brooklynistä lähdön jälkeen Eilis ja Tony lapsineen ovat asettuneet Long Islandille. Vaikka Irlanti on lähempänä Eilisin sydäntä kuin uusi kotimaa, hän ei ole palannut synnyinseuduilleen koko tänä aikana. Kaikki kuitenkin muuttuu, kun muuan irlantilaismies koputtaa Eilisin oveen. Odottamattomien uutisten myötä hänen ajatuksensa kääntyvät takaisin tuttuihin maisemiin ja ihmisiin. Oliko Tony aikoinaan oikea valinta? Onko enää mahdollista raivata uutta polkua tai sytyttää uudelleen rakkauden kipinä, jonka luuli jo kerran sammuneen? Irlantilainen Colm Tóibín (s. 1955) on kirjoittanut romaaneja, novelleja, esseitä, näytelmiä ja lehtiartikkeleita. Hänen teoksiaan on käännetty yli 30 kielelle ja hän on saanut niistä useita kirjallisuuspalkintoja. Tóibín on ollut kahdesti Booker-ehdokkaana, ja romaanista Brooklyn hän sai Costa-palkinnon.

A woman in Galway hears of the death of her son in the First World War. An Irishman is living an anonymous existence in Barcelona, under the shadows of crimes he has committed. A man goes to Dublin from Enniscorthy to implore the Minister for Health for a special favour. A young woman is pregnant during the Spanish Civil War. An undocumented worker finds himself living an illegal life and must leave San Francisco, and his child, after thirty years in America. Three sisters who have been living in Argentina decide to return to Catalonia.In the luminous stories that make up The News from Dublin Colm Tóibín delves into the days and nights of those living far from home: lives of great longing, at a great distance from past lives and past selves.

From Colm T ib n, "one of the world's best living literary writers" (The Boston Globe), comes a brilliant collection of eleven 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 T ib n 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 WWII, 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. T ib n'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 T ib n's short fiction for new readers who may have discovered T ib n 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).

Available for the first time in a beautiful standalone edition, one of Colm T ib n's finest short stories and "the most striking example of T ibin'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. T ib n's powers of imagination and transfixing emotional insight are on full display.

This revelatory book delves into the lives and stories of some of the staff that ran the Frick mansion. A social and historical exploration based on archival material—some published here for the first time—it repopulates the house and provides critical insight into the work it requires to run. Published by Paul Holberton Publishing

A shattering tale of oppression and resistance during Franco’s dictatorship, by a beloved Spanish novelist “Passion in ordinary lives, sobriety and melancholy are the flavors of Delibes’s writing . . . with a profound empathy for nature and the poor. . . . The Holy Innocents [is] a ferocious story.”—The Guardian Named One of the Best 100 Spanish-Language Novels of the Twentieth Century (El Mundo) • Adapted into an Award-Winning Film by Mario Camus In the arid province of Extremadura in 1960s Spain, life on a country estate carries on as it has for centuries: wealthy landowners live in luxury while workers endure lives of poverty and humiliation. Amid this exploitation and injustice live Régula, an estate’s gatekeeper, and her husband, Paco, the hunting attendant of the contemptuous Señorito Iván. Régula’s brother Azarías toils as a farmhand, but he prefers chasing tawny owls at night, training his pet jackdaw, and caring for his young niece, who is bedridden. When Paco is injured, the nature-loving Azarías is forced to take over as hunting attendant. But after Señorito Iván commits an act of enormous cruelty following an unsuccessful hunt, it is only a matter of time before the simmering tensions between the aristocracy and the workers explode. A perennial Spanish classic, translated into twelve languages but never before into English, The Holy Innocents is a searing tale of human cruelty and alienation, in which resistance and liberation are not just necessary but possible.

‘Donoghue was alert to the idea of the unsayable, as he circled around the idea of language itself as pliable material, all the more beautiful for that and worthy of our full consideration, but yielding at times to further levels of mystery...’ from foreword by Colm Tóibín In this last written work, the internationally renowned Irish literary critic Denis Donoghue brings an acute critical intelligence to bear on the late novels of Henry James. One of the greatest novelists in the English language, Henry James (1843-1916) was an American-British author who is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism. James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881) was the central achievement of his early period. The Turn of the Screw (1898) was a high-point of Gothic literature. In The Correction of Taste, Denis Donoghue offers a close reading of James’s final novels, taking as his starting point an observation by T.S. Eliot about the function of literary criticism. Exploring a succession of works such as The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Golden Bowl (1905), Donoghue brings into sharp focus the complex layers of James’s literary genius.

The love story of the centuryLong Island by Colm Tóibín, the author of Brooklyn, is his masterpiece: an exquisite, exhilarating novel that asks whether it is possible to truly return to the past and renew the great love that seemed gone forever.The Sunday Times bestseller & Waterstones Fiction Book of the MonthA man with an Irish accent knocks on Eilis Fiorello’s door on Long Island. In that moment, everything changes. This stranger will reveal something that will make Eilis question the life she has created.For the first time in years she suddenly feels very far from home and the revelation will see her turn towards Ireland once again. Back to her mother. Back to the town and the people she had chosen to leave behind.Did she make the wrong choice all those years ago? Is it too late now to take a different path?‘Riveting’ Elizabeth Strout‘Masterful’ Douglas Stuart‘Wonderful’ Oprah Winfrey‘Entrancing’ The Economist‘Magnificent’ The Times‘Exquisite’ New York Times‘Gorgeous’ The Independent‘Dazzling’ The Financial Times‘A masterclass’ The Guardian*Long Island was an instant Sunday Times bestseller w/c 27/5/24

In Love in a Dark Time, Colm Tóibín looks at 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 studies how a changing world impacted on the lives of people who, on the whole, kept their homosexuality hidden, and reveals that the laws of desire changed everything for them, both in their private lives and in the spirit of their work.Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.

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 life and the legacy of history in a bleak and desolate landscape.Tóibín describes the rituals – the marches, the funerals, the demonstrations – observed by both communities along the border, and listens to the stories which haunt both sides. With sympathy and insight Bad Blood captures the intimacy of life along one of the most contested strips of land in Western Europe.Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.

Colm Tóibín's Homage to Barcelona 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 Civil War, the Franco years and the transition from dictatorship to democracy which Colm Tóibín witnessed in the 1970s.Written with deep knowledge and affection, Homage to Barcelona is a sensuous and beguiling portrait of a unique Mediterranean port and an adopted home.Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.

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 bigoted. He then set down his impressions in The Sign of the Cross, a beautifully written book filled with personal detail set within its historical context.Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.

A compelling portrait of a beloved poet from one of today's most acclaimed novelistsIn 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 her experiences of loss and exile resonate with his own. What emerges is a compelling double portrait that will intrigue readers interested in both Bishop and Tóibín.For Tóibín, the secret of Bishop's emotional power is in what she leaves unsaid. Exploring Bishop’s famous attention to detail, Tóibín describes how Bishop is able to convey great emotion indirectly, through precise descriptions of particular settings, objects, and events. He examines how Bishop’s attachment to the Nova Scotia of her childhood, despite her later life in Key West and Brazil, is related to her early loss of her parents—and how this connection finds echoes in Tóibín’s life as an Irish writer who has lived in Barcelona, New York, and elsewhere.Beautifully written and skillfully blending biography, literary appreciation, and descriptions of Tóibín’s travels to Bishop’s Nova Scotia, Key West, and Brazil, On Elizabeth Bishop provides a fresh and memorable look at a beloved poet even as it gives us a window into the mind of one of today’s most acclaimed novelists.