Coming of age in small-town Ireland in the years following World War II, Eilis Lacey is one among many of her generation who cannot find a job in the miserable economy. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis to live and work in America, she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind.

Eilis takes up her new life in a crowded Brooklyn boarding house, working in a department store on

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"The Magician opens at the turn of the twentieth century in a provincial German city where the young boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative, conventional father and a Brazilian mother, exotic and unpredictable, who will never fit in. He hides both his artistic aspirations and his homosexual desires from this father, and his sexuality from everyone. He longs for the charismatic, beautiful, rich, cultured young Jewish man, but marries his twin...

Tells the story of Henry James, a famous novelist born into one of America's intellectual first 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...

"Silence" is a brilliant historical set piece about Lady Gregory, widowed and abandoned by her lover, who tells the writer Henry James a confessional story at a dinner party. In "Two Women," an eminent Irish set designer, aloof and prickly, takes a job in her homeland, and is forced to confront devastating emotions she has long repressed. "The New Spain" is the story of an intransigent woman who returns home after a decade in exile and shatters the...

"From one of the most engaging and brilliant writers of our time comes a collection of essays about growing up in Ireland during radical change; about cancer, priests, popes, homosexuality, and literature"--

In a brilliant, nuanced, and wholly original collection of essays, the bestselling and award-winning author of Brooklyn and The Empty Family offers a fascinating exploration of famous writers' relationships to their families and their work. From Jane Austen's aunts to Tennessee Williams's mentally ill sister, the impact of intimate family dynamics can be seen in many of literature's greatest works. In New Ways to Kill Your Mother, Colm Tóibín-celebrated...

It is Ireland in the late twentieth century. Eamon Redmond is a judge in the Irish High Court who is beginning to discover how painfully unconnected he is from other human beings.

"A wide variety of poems, ranging in setting and topic, Vinegar Hill deals with gay experience and with the experience of loss, with memory and a fading past as well as the present moment"--