The Empty Family: Stories - Softcover

Toibin, Colm

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0771084358 ISBN 13: 9780771084355

Publisher: Emblem Editions, 2011

Synopsis

From the internationally celebrated author of Brooklyn and The Master, and winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, comes a stunning new book of fiction.

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.

Like Tóibín's celebrated novels, and his previous short story collection, Mothers and Sons, reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, The Empty Family will further confirm Tóibín's status as "his generation's most gifted writer of love's complicated, contradictory power." (Los Angeles Times)
From the Hardcover edition.

About this title

Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2011: A young woman returning to the small island of her childhood summers; a nephew caring for his dying aunt; two men cautiously discovering love amid a community shrouded in tradition--these are the delicately rendered characters inhabiting Colm Toibin's remarkable collection of short stories, The Empty Family. Toibin artfully constructs the quiet moments in the lives of individuals, examining the unexpected ways in which people become strangers to one another as families fragment, separate, and regenerate in new forms. With a tone that moves seamlessly between fervor and melancholy, Toibin examines the imperfect relationships of parents, children, lovers, and friends, and--with a befitting nod toward Henry James--the meaning of love in its many forms. In The Empty Family, Toibin proves once again that his mastery of language is matched only by his acute understanding of human longing. --Lynette Mong

About the Author

COLM TÓIBÍN is the award-winning author of six internationally acclaimed novels, most recently The Blackwater Lightship, The Master, winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Le prix du meilleur livre étranger, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Novel Award. Tóibín's previous book of short fiction was the #1 national bestseller Mothers and Sons. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.
From the Hardcover edition.

About this edition

• Publisher: Emblem Editions
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0771084358
• ISBN 13: 9780771084355
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 224