Colm Tóibín

In Ireland in the early 1950s, Eilis Lacey is one of many who cannot find work at home. Thus when a job is offered in America, it is clear to everyone that she must go. Leaving behind her family and country, Eilis heads for unfamiliar Brooklyn, and to a crowded boarding house where the landlady's intense scrutiny and the small jealousies of her fellow residents only deepen her isolation. Slowly, the pain of parting is buried beneath the rhythms of...

"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 love...

A collection of short fiction includes "The Street," in which Pakistani workers in Barcelona pursue a taboo affair; and "Two Women," in which a taciturn Irish set designer confronts repressed emotions while working in her homeland.

Presents a fictionalized study based upon the many biographical materials and family accounts of nineteenth-century novelist Henry James and examines his life of loneliness, despair, and failed relationships.

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...

Provocative, haunting and indelible, this portrait of Mary presents her as a solitary older woman still seeking to understand the events that become the narrative of the New Testament and the foundation of Christianity. Years after the crucifixion, Mary lives alone and refuses to help the authors of the Gospel. She does not agree that her son is the Son of God; nor that his death was 'worth it'; nor that these mere men that followed him were holy...

"This ... collection explores a subject of nearly universal experience: the psychological push and pull between a mother and a 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."--Container

First published in 1903 in serial form, Henry James' "The Ambassadors" is the story of the middle-aged and naïve Lewis Lambert Strether, who travels to Europe at the behest of his widowed fiancée to find her supposedly wayward son, Chad Newsome. Mrs. Newsome fears he has fallen under the spell of a sinful woman and Strether must rescue him. With the intent of bringing Chad back to America and to his post at the family business, Strether encounters...

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...