Colm Tóibín

"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'...

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

...

A "retelling of the Greek myth of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and their children -- a spectacularly audacious, violent and riveting story of family and vengeance"--Dust jacket. Since her husband King Agamemnon left ancient Mycenae to sail with his army for Troy, Clytemnestra rules along with her lover Aegisthus. Together they plot the bloody murder of Agamemnon on the day of his return. Clytemnestra reveals how her husband deceived her eldest daughter...

"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...

"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,...

In his essay on Tennessee Williams, the author reveals an artist profoundly tormented by his sister's mental illness. Through the relationship between W.B. Yeats and his father, he examines a world of family relations, and in Roddy Doyle's writing on his parents illuminates an Ireland reinvented. From John Cheever's journals he makes flesh this darkly comic misanthrope and his intimates. Educating an intellectual woman, Cheever remarked, is like letting...

"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, forces her to reexamine all her relationships: to her lover, her art, and the homeland she only thought she knew"--Page 4 of cover.

"From one of the most engaging and brilliant writers of our time comes a collection of essays about growing up in Ireland during radical change; about cancer, priests, popes, homosexuality, and literature"--

"A retelling of the story of Clytemnestra and her children from Greek mythology"-- Since her husband King Agamemnon left ancient Mycenae to sail with his army for Troy, Clytemnestra rules along with her lover Aegisthus. Together they plot the bloody murder of Agamemnon on the day of his return. Clytemnestra reveals how her husband deceived her eldest daughter Iphigeneia with a promise of marriage to Achilles, only to sacrifice her because that is...