Colm Tóibín
From AwardAnnals
Information about the author.
Works
- 2 works
- Show titles only
Colm Tóibín
Like Michael Cunningham in The Hours, Colm Tóibín captures the extraordinary mind and heart of a great writer. Brilliant and profoundly moving, The Master tells the story of Henry James, a man born into one of America’s first intellectual 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 him and those he tried to love. The emotional intensity of Tóibín’s portrait of James is riveting. Time and again, James, a master of psychological subtlety in his fiction, proves blind to his own heart and incapable of reconciling his dreams of passion with his own fragility.
Tóibín is “a great and humanizing writer” who describes complex relationships in “supple, beautifully modulated prose” (The Washington Post Book World). In The Master, he has written his most…
The Blackwater Lightship: A Novel
Colm Tóibín
A beautifully written, deeply resonant story about three generations of an estranged family reuniting to mourn a tragic, untimely death—from the author Nick Hornby called “one of the most promising novelists writing in the English language.”
It is Ireland in the early 1990s. Helen, her mother Lily, and her grandmother Dora have come together, after a decade of estrangement, to tend to Helen’s beloved brother, Declan, who is dying of AIDS. Under the crumbling roof of Dora’s old house in Ireland, Declans’ two friends join the women as each waits for the end. All six of them, from different generations and with different beliefs are forced to plumb the shoals of their own histories and to come to terms with each other.
In spare, luminous prose, Toibin explores the nature of love and the complex emotion inside an unhappy family. The Blackwater Lightship is a novel about morals and manners, and the clashes of culture and personality. But most of all, it is a novel about stories, and their incomparable capacity to heal the deepest wounds.
