The Empty Family

The bestselling and award-winning author of Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín, returns with a stunning collection of stories--a book that's both a perfect introduction to Tóibín and, for longtime fans, a bracing pleasure (The Seattle Times). Critics praised Brooklyn as a beautifully rendered portrait of Brooklyn and provincial Ireland in the 1950s. In The Empty Family, Tóibín has extended his imagination further, offering an incredible range of periods and characters--people linked by love, loneliness, desire--the unvarying dilemmas of the human heart ( The Observer, UK). In the breathtaking long story The Street, Tóibín imagines a relationship between Pakistani workers in Barcelona--a taboo affair in a community ruled by obedience and silence. In Two Women, an eminent and taciturn Irish set designer takes a job in her homeland and must confront emotions she has long repressed. Silence is a brilliant historical set piece about Lady Gregory, who tells the writer Henry James a confessional story at a dinner party. The Empty Family will further cement Tóibín's status as his generation's most gifted writer of love's complicated, contradictory power ( Los Angeles Times ).