Colm Tóibín
1) The South
Author
Language
English
Description
The first highly acclaimed novel from an immensely gifted and accomplished writer, about an Irishwoman who creates a new life in post-war Spain.
In 1950, Katherine Proctor leaves Ireland for Barcelona, determined to escape her family and become a painter. There she meets Miguel, an anarchist veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and begins to build a life with him. But Katherine cannot escape her past, as Michael Graves, a fellow Irish émigré in Spain,...
Author
Language
English
Description
Award-winning novelist Tóibín brings to this stunning first collection of short works an acute understanding of human frailty and longing. These nine beautifully written, intensely intimate stories explore the psychological push and pull between mother and son. Each story is centered on a transformative moment that alters the delicate balance of power in that relationship and changes the way mother and son perceive one another. With exquisite grace...
Author
Language
English
Description
"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 party. In "Two Women," an eminent Irish set designer, aloof and prickly, takes a job in her homeland, and is forced to confront devastating emotions she has long repressed. "The New Spain" is the story of an intransigent woman who returns home after a decade in exile and shatters the...
Author
Language
English
Description
In a brilliant, nuanced, and wholly original collection of essays, the bestselling and award-winning author of Brooklyn and The Empty Family offers a fascinating exploration of famous writers' relationships to their families and their work.
From Jane Austen's aunts to Tennessee Williams's mentally ill sister, the impact of intimate family dynamics can be seen in many of literature's greatest works. In New Ways to Kill Your Mother, Colm Tóibín-celebrated...
6) Nora Webster
Author
Language
English
Description
"From one of contemporary literature's bestselling, critically acclaimed and beloved authors, a magnificent new novel set in Ireland, about a fiercely compelling young widow and mother of four, navigating grief and fear, struggling for hope. Set in Wexford, Ireland, Colm Tóibín's superb seventh novel introduces the formidable, memorable and deeply moving Nora Webster. Widowed at forty, with four children and not enough money, Nora has lost the...
Author
Language
English
Description
"The Magician opens at the turn of the twentieth century in a provincial German city where the young boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative, conventional father and a Brazilian mother, exotic and unpredictable, who will never fit in. He hides both his artistic aspirations and his homosexual desires from this father, and his sexuality from everyone. He longs for the charismatic, beautiful, rich, cultured young Jewish man, but marries his twin...
Author
Language
English
Description
"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...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Colm Tóibín – Winner of the 2017 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation" "Colm Tóibín, Inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame 2015" "Nominee for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism" "One of The Guardian's Best Books of 2015, selected by Blake Morrison" "One of The Guardian's Best Books of 2015, selected by Nicci Gerrard" "One of The Guardian's Readers'...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
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.
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Coming of age in small-town Ireland in the years following World War II, Eilis Lacey is one among many of her generation who cannot find a job in the miserable economy. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis to live and work in America, she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind.
Eilis takes up her new life in a crowded Brooklyn boarding house, working in a department store on
...Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony's parents, a huge extended family that lives and works, eats and plays together. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis, now in her forties with two teenage children, has no one to rely on in this still-new country. Though her ties to the town...
14) Vinegar Hill
Author
Publisher
Beacon Press
Pub. Date
[2022]
Language
English
Description
"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"--
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
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...
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 9.6 - AR Pts: 44
Language
English
Description
After the death of her father, Isabel Archer, a young American woman, travels to England to stay with her aunt, where she finds herself an object of affection for several men. When she is left a large legacy by her ailing uncle, she also attracts the attention of those with an interest in her substantial fortune. Faced with decisions about her future, Isabel must live with the consequences of the choices she makes, as her life is forever altered.
The...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Here is an American mind contemplating contemporary society and culture with wit, imagination, and a brave intelligence. Tillman upends expectations, shifts tone, introduces characters, breaches limits of genre and category, reconfiguring the world with the turn of a sentence. Like other unique thinkers, Tillman sees the world differently she is not a malcontent, but she is discontented. Her responses to art and literature, to social and political...
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.4 - AR Pts: 10
Language
English
Description
"Set against the backdrop of 1920s post-World War I Europe, this iconic novel takes you on a journey through the lives of a group of expatriates as they grapple with the complexities of love, friendship, and the search for meaning in a world forever changed. Join the charismatic and enigmatic Jake Barnes, a war veteran grappling with a life-altering injury, as he navigates the bohemian nightlife of Paris and the exhilarating bullfighting culture of...