'I imagined lamplight, shadows, soft voices, clothes put away, the low sound of late news on the radio. And I thought as I crossed the bridge at Baggot Street to face the last stretch of my own journey home that no matter what I had done, I had not done that.' In the captivating stories that make up The Empty Family , Colm Toibin delineates with a tender and unique sensibility lives of unspoken or unconscious longing, of individuals, often willingly, cast adrift from their history. From the young Pakistani immigrant who seeks some kind of permanence in a strange town to the Irish woman reluctantly returning to Dublin and discovering a city that refuses to acknowledge her long absence each of Toibin's stories manage to contain whole worlds: stories of fleeing the past and returning home, of family threads lost and ultimately regained.
'Colm Toibin's new collection is the work of an author at the peak of his writing powers' The Times
'Always deeply moving, the stories here - like the surf-washed pebbles on that Wexford beach - will be read for meaning and enjoyed for their shape and sound for ages to come' Tribune
'It's a collection that will only further fuel Toibin's ascent through English fiction' Independent on Sunday
'Exquisite ... The chief reason to read these stories is the peculiar power of Colm Toibin's prose' Telegraph
'Astonishingly precise, depicting complex and conflicted states of mind with rare clarity' Observer
'Beautifully observed' Sunday Times
'Toibin's deceptively straightforward style continues to manage somehow to encompass both lucidity and ambiguity, precision and poetry' Irish Times
Author
About Colm Toibin
Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy in 1955. He is the author of eight novels including Blackwater Lightship, The Master and The Testament of Mary, all three of which were nominated for the Booker Prize, with The Master also winning the IMPAC Award, and Brooklyn, which won the Costa Novel Award. He has also published two collections of stories and many works of non-fiction. His most recent novel is Nora Webster. He lives in Dublin.
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