It is Ireland in the early 1990s. Helen, her mother, Lily, and her grandmother, Dora have come together to tend to Helen's brother, Declan, who is dying of AIDS. With Declan's two friends, the six of them are forced to plumb the shoals of their own histories and to come to terms with each other.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Blackwater Lightship is a deeply resonant story about three generations of an estranged family reuniting to mourn an untimely death. In spare, luminous prose, Colm Toibin explores the nature of love and the complex emotions inside a family at war with...

Colm Toibin knows the languages of the outsider, the secret keeper, the gay man or woman. He knows the covert and overt language of homosexuality in literature. In Love in a Dark Time, he also describes the solace of finding like-minded companions through reading.

Toibin examines the life and work of some of the greatest and most influential writers of the past two centuries, figures whose homosexuality remained hidden or oblique for much of their lives, either by choice or necessity. The larger world couldn't know about their sexuality, but in their private lives, and in the...

"Colm Toibin's beautiful, subtle illumination of Henry James's inner life" (The New York Times) captures the loneliness and hope of a master of psychological subtlety whose forays into intimacy inevitably fail those he tried to love.

Beautiful and profoundly moving, The Master tells the story of Henry James, a man born into one of America's first intellectual families who leaves his country in the late nineteenth century to live in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among privileged artists and writers. With stunningly resonant prose, "The Master is unquestionably the work of a...

From the award-winning author of Brooklyn and The Master, a powerful, brave, and moving novel set in Argentina.

In Argentina, in the time of the Generals, the streets are empty at night, and people have trained themselves not to see. Richard Garay lives with his mother, hiding his sexuality from her and from society. Stifled by his job, Richard is willing to take chances, both sexually and professionally. But Argentina is changing, and as his country edges toward peace, Richard tentatively begins a love affair. The result is a powerful, brave, and poignant novel of sex,...

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."
Summering with a fellow schoolboy on a great English estate, Leo, the hero of L. P. Hartley's finest novel, encounters a world of unimagined luxury. But when his friend's beautiful older sister enlists him as the unwitting messenger in her illicit love affair, the aftershocks will be felt for years. The inspiration for the brilliant Joseph Losey/Harold Pinter film starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, The Go-Between is a masterpiece--a richly layered, spellbinding story about past and present, naivete and...

Each of the nine stories in this beautifully written, intensely intimate collection centers on a transformative moment that alters the delicate balance of power between mother and son, or changes the way they perceive one another. With exquisite grace and eloquence, Toibin writes of men and women bound by convention, by unspoken emotions, by the stronghold of the past. Many are trapped in lives they would not choose again, if they ever chose at all.

A man buries his mother and converts his grief to desire in one night. A famous singer captivates an audience, yet cannot beguile her own...

This unique volume, comprising Colm Toibin's acclaimed short text and a linked collection of key documents put together by one of Ireland's leading younger historians, offers a many-sided view of one's of history's most poignant and far-reaching catastrophes. This book will allow the reader to understand the complex way in which the fragmentary past is both available to us ... and distant from us.' We get those insights from Toibin's short history and from a rich collection of documents -- government papers, recipes, journalism, letters, statistics, personal statements, all linked so the...

This biography redefines the woman George Bernard Shaw once described as the greatest living Irishwoman - Augusta Gregory. A remarkable figure in Celtic history, she was married to an MP and land-owner, yet retained an unprecedented independence of both thought and deed, actively championing causes close to her heart.

Soon after the Anglo-Irish agreement, Colm Toibin travelled along the Irish border from Derry to Newry. In this work he tells of fear and anger, and of the historical legacy that has imprinted itself on the landscape and its inhabitants."

First published in hardcover to vigorous praise, Colm Toibin's New York Times bestselling novel is about a young Irish immigrant in Brooklyn in the early 1950s.

"One of the most unforgettable characters in contemporary literature" (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the hard years following World War Two. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America, she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind.

Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street,...