Colm Tóibín

In Ireland in the early 1950s, Eilis Lacey is one of many who cannot find work at home. Thus when a job is offered in America, it is clear to everyone that she must go. Leaving behind her family and country, Eilis heads for unfamiliar Brooklyn, and to a crowded boarding house where the landlady's intense scrutiny and the small jealousies of her fellow residents only deepen her isolation. Slowly, the pain of parting is buried beneath the rhythms of...

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.

"Colm Tóibín begins his incisive, revelatory Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know with a walk through the Dublin streets where he went to university--a wide-eyed boy from the country--and where three Irish literary giants also came of age: Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce. Elegant, profound, and riveting, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know illuminates not only the complex relationships between three of the greatest writers in the English language and their fathers, but...

"A wide variety of poems, ranging in setting and topic, Vinegar Hill deals with gay experience and with the experience of loss, with memory and a fading past as well as the present moment"-- Provided by publisher.

Colm Tóibín's second novel 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...

From Jane Austen's aunts to Tennessee William's mentally ill sister, the impact of intimate family dynamics can be seen in many of literature's greatest works. Tóibín traces and interprets those intriguing, eccentric, often twisted family ties in this collection of essays.

Colm Toibin brings a modern sensibility and language to an ancient classic, and gives this extraordinary character new life, so that listeners not only believe Clytemnestra's thirst for revenge, but applaud it. He brilliantly inhabits the mind of one of Greek myth's most powerful villains to reveal the love, lust, and pain she feels. Told in fours parts, this is a fiercely dramatic portrait of a murderess, who will herself be murdered by her own son,...

Colm Tóibín's exquisitely written new stories, set in present-day Ireland, 1970s Spain and nineteenth century England, are about people linked by love, loneliness and desire. Tóibín is a master at portraying mute emotion, intense intimacies that remain unacknowledged or unspoken. "Silence" is a brilliant historical set piece about Lady Gregory, widowed and abandoned by her lover, who tells the writer Henry James a confessional story at a dinner...

"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 her experiences of loss and exile resonate with his own. What emerges is a compelling...

Sent by his fiancée to seek her son who has run away with an entrancing Parisian woman, Lambert Strether finds himself nearly as bewitched by the culture and women of Europe as his would-be son-in-law. Strether gets chased or dragged across provincial France by a slew of influences intent either on drawing the pair of bachelors home to Boston or showing him the world, and winds up testing his patience along with his own illusions.