The Empty Family: Stories - Hardcover

Colm Tóibín's new collection is the work of an author at the peak of his writing powers

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

Exquisite . . . The chief reason to read these stories is the peculiar power of Colm Tóibín's prose

Beautifully observed

Tóibín's deceptively straightforward style continues to manage somehow to encompass both lucidity and ambiguity, precision and poetry

Exquisite

'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 Tóibín 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 Tóibín's stories manage to contain whole worlds: stories of fleeing the past and returning home, of family threads lost and ultimately regained.