THE EMPTY FAMILY : STORIES PB – COLM TOIBIN

In the captivating stories that make up The Empty Family Colm Toibin delineates with a tender and unique sensibility lives of unspoken or unconscious longing, of individuals, often willingly, cast adrift from their history. 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. 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 Toibin s stories manage to contain whole worlds: stories of fleeing the past and returning home, of family threads lost and ultimately regained. Exquisite . . . The chief reason to read these stories is the peculiar power of Colm Toibin s prose Telegraph Astonishingly precise, depicting complex and conflicted states of mind with rare clarity Observer Beautifully observed Sunday Times