Books by Colm Tóibín

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2004, a remarkable novel about Henry James, the American-born novelist and a connoisseur of exile.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2013From the author of Brooklyn comes a short, powerful novel about one of the most famous mothers in history.In a voice that is both tender and filled with rage, The Testament of Mary tells the story of a cataclysmic event which led to an overpowering grief. For Mary, her son has been lost to the world, and now, living in exile and in fear, she tries to piece together the memories of the events that led to her son's brutal death. To her he was a vulnerable figure, surrounded by men who could not be trusted, living in a time of turmoil and change. As her life and her suffering begin to acquire the resonance of myth, Mary struggles to break the silence surrounding what she knows to have happened. In her effort to tell the truth in all its gnarled complexity, she slowly emerges as a figure of immense moral stature as well as a woman from history rendered now as fully human.

Focusing on the relationship between WB Yeats and his father or Thomas Mann and his children or JM Synge and his mother, the author examines a world of family relations, richly comic or savage in its implications.

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.

It is Ireland in the early 1950s and for Eilis Lacey, as for so many young Irish girls, opportunities are scarce. So when her sister arranges for her to emigrate to New York, Eilis knows she must go, leaving behind her family and her home for the first time.

Toibin's remarkable insights provide scholars, students, and general readers a fresh encounter with James's well-known texts.

Part travelogue, part autobiography, part historical document, this is Colm Toibin at his finest and most insightful.

This sharp and stylish biography redefines the woman George Bernard Shaw once described as 'the greatest living Irishwoman' - Augusta Gregory.

In this perceptive and rich collection of essays, Colm Toibin investigates the lives as well as the work of homosexual writers and artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Written with deep knowledge and affection, Homage to Barcelona is a sensuous and beguiling portrait of a great Mediterranean city.