THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER
WINNER OF THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2022
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION 2022

From one of our greatest living writers comes a sweeping novel of unrequited love and exile, war and family.

The Magician tells the story of Thomas Mann, whose life was filled with great acclaim and contradiction. He would find himself on the wrong side of history in the First World War, cheerleading the German army, but have a clear vision of the future in the second, anticipating the horrors of Nazism.

He would have six children and keep his homosexuality hidden; he was a man forever connected to his family and yet bore witness to the ravages of suicide. He would write some of the greatest works of European literature, and win the Nobel Prize, but would never return to the country that inspired his creativity.

Through one life, Colm Tóibín tells the breathtaking story of the twentieth century.
___________________________________

'As with everything Colm Tóibín sets his masterful hand to, The Magician is a great imaginative achievement -- immensely readable, erudite, worldly and knowing, and fully realized' - Richard Ford

'No living novelist dramatizes artistic creation as profoundly, as luminously, as Colm Tóibín . . . reading him is among the deepest pleasures our literature can offer' - Garth Greenwell

'This is not just a whole life in a novel, it's a whole world' - Katharina Volckmer

In a small town in the south-east of Ireland in the 1950s, Eilis Lacey is one among many of her generation who cannot find work at home. So when a job is offered in America, it is clear that she must go. Leaving her family and home, Eilis sets off to forge a new life for herself in Brooklyn. Young, homesick and alone, she gradually buries the pain of parting beneath the rhythms of a new life - days at the till in a large department store, night classes in Brooklyn College and Friday evenings on the dance floor of the parish hall - until she realizes that she has found a sort of happiness. But when tragic news summons her back to Ireland, and the constrictions of her old life unexpectedly give way to new possibilities, she finds herself facing a terrible choice: between love and happiness in the land where she belongs and the promises she must keep on the far side of the ocean.

Brooklyn is a tender story of great love and loss, and of the heartbreaking choice between personal freedom and duty. In the character of Eilis Lacey Colm Tóibín has created a remarkable heroine and in Brooklyn a novel of devastating emotional power.

Entra Clitennestra. «Ho dimestichezza con l'odore della morte», esordisce la regina di Micene, che quell'odore lo conosce bene. L'ha sentito sul corpo della figlia primogenita Ifigenia il giorno in cui il marito Agamennone l'ha sacrificata agli dèi per ottenerne il favore nella guerra imminente, dopo averla attirata all'accampamento con l'inganno. Moglie furiosa e madre straziata, Clitennestra prepara a lungo la sua vendetta e, al ritorno del re, si appresta a sentire di nuovo l'odore della morte, quella di Agamennone questa volta, fra le mura del loro palazzo e per sua stessa mano. Nella lingua precisa, essenziale ed elegante di cui ha dato prova in tutta la sua opera, Colm Tóibín fa rivivere le figure classiche della casata di Atreo e, intaccando la loro mitica intangibilità, le rende personaggi di carne e sangue, dotati di psicologia, motivazioni e tonalità. La Clitennestra di Tóibín è ancora la rancorosa regina del mito, ma è anche una donna alle prese con la gestione modernamente complessa del potere e con un amante, Egisto, su cui modulare desiderio e controllo. La sua Elettra è la figlia fedele che pretende la retribuzione del sangue, ma è anche la vittima di abbandono che cerca nelle ombre un sollievo dalla solitudine. Per tutti loro il processo di umanizzazione è reso particolarmente efficace dalla scomparsa di un orizzonte divino a cui ubbidire e delegare. Nel mondo della Casa dei nomi gli antichi dèi stanno svanendo e la loro legge vacilla. Non prega piú Clitennestra, si chiude la porta che conduceva Elettra ad Agamennone. Non ad Apollo si deve il piano di vendetta attuato da Oreste, né alle Erinni la sua follia. Pensieri e progetti, speranze e disperazioni si avviano a essere unicamente mortali. A Oreste, che nella tragedia di Eschilo sparisce dalla scena bambino per farvi ritorno solo da adulto in veste di vendicatore matricida, Tóibín regala un'adolescenza, un'avventura, un amore e un dubbio. Ed è questo scarto d'immaginazione a fare della Casa dei nomi «un ritratto intimo e straordinariamente compassionevole» (Literary Review) che dimostra «un'inedita ambizione, sia nel tono che nell'azione» (The Washington Post) e conferma il suo autore come uno dei migliori scrittori di lingua inglese oggi viventi.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2013

From 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.

In Ireland, a man of reason is drawn to a true mystery older than the Pyramids and Stonehenge in this enthralling story about ethereal secrets by New York Times bestselling author Colm Tóibín.

During the winter solstice, on the shortest day and longest night of the year, the ancient burial chamber at Newgrange is empowered. Its mystifying source is a haunting tale told by locals.

Professor O’Kelly believes an archaeologist’s job is to make known only what can be proved. He is undeterred by ghost stories, idle speculation, and caution. Much to the chagrin of the living souls in County Meath. As well as those entombed in the sacred darkness of Newgrange itself. They’re determined to protect the secret of the light, guarded for more than five thousand years. And they know O’Kelly is coming for it.

'I imagined lamplight, shadows, soft voices, clothes put away, the low sound of late news on the radio. And I thought as I crossed the bridge at Baggot Street to face the last stretch of my own journey home that no matter what I had done, I had not done that.'

In the captivating stories that make up The Empty Family Colm Tóibín delineates with a tender and unique sensibility lives of unspoken or unconscious longing, of individuals, often willingly, cast adrift from their history.

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 each of Tóibín's stories manage to contain whole worlds: stories of fleeing the past and returning home, of family threads lost and ultimately regained.

* * * Shortlisted for the 2014 Costa Novel Awards and the 2015 Folio Prize * * *

Nora Webster is the heartbreaking new novel from one of the greatest novelists writing today.

It is the late 1960s in Ireland. Nora Webster is living in a small town, looking after her four children, trying to rebuild her life after the death of her husband. She is fiercely intelligent, at times difficult and impatient, at times kind, but she is trapped by her circumstances, and waiting for any chance which will lift her beyond them.

Slowly, through the gift of music and the power of friendship, she finds a glimmer of hope and a way of starting again. As the dynamic of the family changes, she seems both fiercely self-possessed but also a figure of great moral ambiguity, making her one of the most memorable heroines in contemporary fiction.

The portrait that is painted in the years that follow is harrowing, piercingly insightful, always tender and deeply true. Colm Tóibín's Nora is a character as resonant as Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary and Nora Webster is a novel that illuminates our own lives in a way that is rare in literature. Its humanity and compassion forge an unforgettable reading experience.


'A profoundly gifted world writer' Sebastian Barry

THE TOP 10 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

'They cut her hair before they dragged her to the place of sacrifice. Her mouth was gagged to stop her cursing her father, her cowardly, two-tongued father. Nonetheless, they heard her muffled screams.'

On the day of his daughter's wedding, Agamemnon orders her sacrifice.

His daughter is led to her death, and Agamemnon leads his army into battle, where he is rewarded with glorious victory.

Three years later, he returns home and his murderous action has set the entire family - mother, brother, sister - on a path of intimate violence, as they enter a world of hushed commands and soundless journeys through the palace's dungeons and bedchambers. As his wife seeks his death, his daughter, Electra, is the silent observer to the family's game of innocence while his son, Orestes, is sent into bewildering, frightening exile where survival is far from certain. Out of their desolating loss, Electra and Orestes must find a way to right these wrongs of the past even if it means committing themselves to a terrible, barbarous act.

House of Names is a story of intense longing and shocking betrayal. It is a work of great beauty, and daring, from one of our finest living writers.

An intimate study of three of Ireland's greatest writers from one of its best-loved contemporary voices, Colm Tóibín
__________________

In Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know Colm Tóibín takes three of Ireland's greatest writers - Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats and James Joyce - and examines their earliest influences: their fathers.

With his inimitable wit and sensitivity, Tóibín introduces us to Wilde Senior, the philandering doctor whose libel case prefigured that of his son; the elder Yeats, an impoverished artist who never finished a painting; and to John Stanislaus Joyce, the hard-drinking, storytelling father of James, who couldn't feed his own family.

This is an illuminating study of how each of these men cast a long shadow not only over the lives of their famous sons, but over the works for which they are celebrated and cherished.
__________________

'Astonishing to read. Tóibín has a hawk-like eye for literary subtleties, and a generosity towards his subjects that is warm' Sunday Times

'Funny, exciting, illuminating, wonderful, so engaging. Tells us more than a little about our own selves along the way' Irish Times

'There is something interesting and insightful on almost every page' Observer

'Sparkling, subtle, witty and often deeply moving . . . A classic' Fintan O'Toole, New Statesman

'Scintillating, imaginative, enlightening and powerfully moving throughout' Roy Foster, Spectator