Colm Tóibín

Sent by his fiancée to seek her son who has run away with an entrancing Parisian woman, Lambert Strether finds himself nearly as bewitched by the culture and women of Europe as his would-be son-in-law. Strether gets chased or dragged across provincial France by a slew of influences intent either on drawing the pair of bachelors home to Boston or showing him the world, and winds up testing his patience along with his own illusions.

Tells the story of Henry James, a famous novelist born into one of America's intellectual first families two decades before the Civil War. James left his country to live in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among privileged artists and writers. In stunningly resonant prose, Tóibín captures the loneliness and longing, the hope and despair of a man who never married, never resolved his sexual identity, and whose forays into intimacy inevitably failed...

"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...

"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...

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...

"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"--

From Jane Austen's aunts to Tennessee William's mentally ill sister, the impact of intimate family dynamics can be seen in many of literature's greatest works. Tóibín traces and interprets those intriguing, eccentric, often twisted family ties in this collection of essays.

"The devastating final work by Brazil's greatest modern writer, The Hour of the Star tells the haunting tale of Macabéa-a typist who lives in the slums of Rio-underfed, sickly, and unloved, yet inwardly free"--

This novel is set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s, when one young woman crosses the ocean to make a new life for herself.