A collection of nine short stories, many never-before-published, set across Ireland, Spain, and America—about the complexities of family, longing, loss, and love.
You’ll want to take each of these nine stories slowly ... It’s to be expected. Tóibín’s trademark insight, clarity, and precision demand full-hearted attention. In fact, his prose may deserve a literary patent, if only for its music: a particular purity and resonance in the reading ear ... Oddly, several of these pieces don’t pack Tóibín’s customary punch ... It’s all there: the burnished density of atmosphere, the sentences built simply yet so solidly they issue their own force field — wondrous for sheer grace. Perhaps the term 'Tóibínian' will come to stand for this exact quality of satisfaction.
These stories show a wonderful breadth of vision ... It’s often said that Tóibín is at his best when writing about love, and once again he’s delivered characters raw with intimacy. Still, this collection should remind fans that for serious writers the personal and political always go hand-in-hand. The News from Dublin provides all the pleasure and pain a reader could ask for — even, perhaps especially, in these jaded times.
Deft ... The short form is ideal for Tóibín’s skills: he’s a writer for whom every word must do its job, and he tells these lives with efficiency, directing the reader only gently, and leaving space for us to complete the work ... There’s no sense of this book as scraps gathered, of secondary work that would not have been published without an established author’s name. Even if they had been discovered anonymously, floating in a bottle — off the coast of Ireland, say, or Spain — these stories would still astonish and delight.
