Books by Colm Toibin and Complete Book Reviews

Colm Toibin, Author Scribner Book Company $24 (288p) ISBN 978-0-684-87389-3
One of the young Turks of Irish fiction (The Heather Blazing; The Story of the Night) again examines themes of loss and death in a novel, shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In clipped, stripped-down prose, T ib n unfolds the family saga of Helen,...
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Colm Tóibín. Scribner, $26 (288p) ISBN 978-1-5011-4021-1
Tóibín’s 11th novel retells the ancient Greek tale of Clytemnestra, who kills her husband Agamemnon to avenge the death of their daughter Iphigenia, and her son Orestes, who kills her in turn to avenge his father’s death. The narrators of the novel...
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Colm Tóibín. Princeton Univ., $19.95 (216p) ISBN 978-0-691-15411-4
Novelist Tóibín (Nora Webster) gives an intimate and engaging look at Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry and its influence on his own work. Tóibín begins with an account of Bishop’s guiding principles for writing poetry, including that the words be “precise...
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Colm Tóibín. Scribner, $27 (384p) ISBN 978-1-4391-3833-5
Tóibín’s 10th novel offers a compelling portrait of an Irish woman for whom fate has prescribed loneliness. Widowed at 40, with four children and shaky finances, Nora rejects condolences and pity. She is so intent on making her children’s lives...
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Colm Tóibín. Scribner, $26 (288p) ISBN 978-1-4516-6855-1
Through a series of accessible essays, lectures, and reviews that rove from Jane Austen to Brian Moore—many of which appeared in either the London or New York Review of Books— Tóibín explores the ambivalent relationships that many writers of the...
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Colm Toibin, Author Viking Books $20 (256p) ISBN 978-0-670-84789-1
Irish novelist Toibin here follows up his Irish Times /Aer Lingus Irish Literature Award-winning first book, The South , with another extended study in paralysis--not the physical kind, but rather the willed emotional stasis that James Joyce, in a...
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Colm Toibin, Author . Scribner $24 (272p) ISBN 978-0-7432-2944-9
Departing from recent novels The Blackwater Lightship and The Story of the Night and nonfiction such as his Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border, Dublin-based writer Tóibín offers nine case studies in as many chapters of how "
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Colm Toibin, Author Henry Holt & Company $23 (312p) ISBN 978-0-8050-5211-4
In elegantly crafted prose, Irish author Toibin (The South; The Heather Blazing) delivers a rewarding narrative that blends themes of personal intensity and historical import. Set in Buenos Aires in the 1980s, the novel follows the fortunes of...
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Colm Toibin, Author Vintage Books USA $13 (0p) ISBN 978-0-679-75855-6
Novelist and ""collapsed Catholic"" Toibin looks at Catholic rituals as practiced throughout Europe. (Sept.)
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Colm Toibin, Author Penguin Books $15 (256p) ISBN 978-0-14-017532-5
Irish novelist Toibin offers a profound study of the emotional paralysis which grips a Dublin High Court Judge and his family. (Mar.)
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Colm Toibin, Author Penguin Books $15 (240p) ISBN 978-0-14-014986-9
Irish journalist Toibin's compelling tale of love and art set in the United Kingdom and Franco's Spain, makes for a rich and remarkable debut. (Oct.)
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Colm Tóibín, Scribner, $24 (288p) ISBN 978-1-4391-3832-8
Tóibín returns to his native shores from Brooklyn for the bulk of these nine pristine stories, all—save one—contemporary tales of lives haunted by loss, whether it's the legacy of a sexually abusive priest in an already complicated love triangle in "
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Colm Toibin, Author . Scribner $25 (262p) ISBN 978-1-4391-3831-1
Signature Reviewed by Maureen Howard Colm Tóibín’s engaging new novel, Brooklyn , will not bring to mind the fashionable borough of recent years nor Bed-Stuy beleaguered with the troubles of a Saturday night. Tóibí
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Colm Toibin, Author . Scribner $24 (271p) ISBN 978-1-4165-3465-5
Nine stories from the author of The Master , The Blackwater Lightship and three other novels explore what happens when mothers and sons confront one another as adults. The sons include a middle-aged petty criminal, a young alienated pub musician...
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Colm Toibin, Author . Scribner $25 (352p) ISBN 978-0-7432-5040-5
It's a bold writer indeed who dares to put himself inside the mind of novelist Henry James, but that is what Tóibín, highly talented Irish author of The Heather Blazing and The Blackwater Lightship , has ventured here, with a...
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Colm Tóibín. Scribner, $23 (96p) ISBN 978-1-4516-8838-2
Tóibín (Brooklyn) has chosen Jesus’ mother as the narrator of his poignant reimagining of the last days of Christ. Mary doesn’t think her son is the son of God; in fact, she’s convinced that he’s simply running with the wrong crowd, “Something about
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Colm Toibin, Author, Diarmaid Ferriter, Author Thomas Dunne Books $23.95 (224p) ISBN 978-0-312-30051-7
Between 1846 and 1849, the potato blight left some one million Irish citizens dead of starvation or disease; Booker Prize-nominated novelist Colm Toibin (The Blackwater Lightship) and historian Diarmaid Ferriter team up to reconsider the tragedy
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Colm Toibin, Author, Gerard Doyle, Read by Blackstone Audiobooks $19.95 (0p) ISBN 978-1-4332-0691-7
Though not a grand storyteller or a consummate imitator of various voices and cadences, Gerard Doyle's introspective and masterful reading of most of Toibín's short stories is nearly perfect. Doyle's assured voice fits Toibín's...
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Colm Tóibín, read by Meryl Streep. Simon & Schuster Audio, unabridged, two CDs, 3 hrs., $14.99 ISBN 978-1-4423-6347-2
Meryl Streep takes on one of her biggest roles to date, voicing the mother of Jesus Christ in this audio edition of Tóibín’s novel. As Mary, Streep’s voice reflects the tragedy that befell Jesus at the hands of the Romans. Her tone is one of regret...
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Colm Tóibín. Scribner, $26 (256p) ISBN 978-1-4767-8517-2
Fans of early modern literature will enjoy this look by novelist Tóibín (House of Names) at the fathers of three of Ireland’s most acclaimed authors. He explores a milieu they shared—the “small Dublin world” of the 19th century—and the many...
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Colm Tóibín, read by Juliet Stevenson, Charlie Anson, and Pippa Nixon. S&S Audio, unabridged, 7 CDs, 9 hrs., $29.99 ISBN 978-1-5082-2790-8
Tóibín executes a masterful retelling of Aeschylus’s trilogy, the Oresteia, through the eyes of Clytemnestra, Orestes, and Electra. When Agamemnon sacrifices his and Clytemnestra’s daughter to the gods, he sets in motion a series of betrayals that...
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Colm Tóibín. Scribner, $28 (512p) ISBN 978-1-4767-8508-0
The Booker-shortlisted Tóibín (House of Names) unfurls an expansive fictional biography of Thomas Mann, a Nobel laureate who was devoted to family, obsessed with physical beauty, and driven by desire. Tóibín draws on excerpts from Mann’s diary...
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Colm Tóibín. Scribner, $27 (336p) ISBN 978-1-4767-8520-2
Novelist Tóibín (The Magician) gathers 11 essays that showcase his versatility in this erudite collection of previously published material. In “Cancer: My Part in Its Downfall,” Tóibín reflects on his testicular cancer and the trials of chemotherapy:
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Colm Tóibín. Scribner, $28 (320p) ISBN 978-1-4767-8511-0
The quietly devastating sequel to Brooklyn picks up two decades later with Eilis Lacey, now in her 40s, hemmed in by her overbearing in-laws on Long Island in 1976. First Eilis discovers that her husband, Tony, has been unfaithful, then she learns...
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ARTICLES
  • Colm Tóibín Is Looking for the Mann
  • BEA 2014: Colm Tóibín: Here, There, and Everywhere
  • Colm Tóibín Is Looking for the Mann
  • A Zoom of One's Own: Poetry 2022
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