Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15562 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-07
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Daily Express
'Exquisitely written and deeply moving. Toibin unflinchingly unravels the delicate strands'

Guardian
'Outstanding... A restrained, absorbing collection'

Sunday Times
'...Toibins small-scale dramas have an emotional density that far outweighs their verbal economy'

Customer Reviews

Well-written but somewhat enigmatic
I had never previously read any of Colm Toibin's works so I came to these short stories with an open mind, though obviously influenced by the good reviews the book has received in the press. I've read just three of the stories: the first two, and the last (the longest) and while the writing is good and the atmosphere is very well evoked I found them somewhat unsatisfying. Sometimes you do need to have an open ending so you can make up your own mind but to me two of these stories almost seemed to be lifted from a longer novel, such was the effect of inconclusiveness.

I much preferred the book of William Trevor's short stories (After Rain) which I read a year earlier - he is a writer I would return to. I will try a novel by Colm Toibin but his short stories don't quite suit my tastes.

Memorable stories
The thread that ties the beautifully written nine stories in this book together is that in each one there is a complex relationship between a mother and a son. I don't think that all of them `focus' on this relationship, as the blurb on the back has it, for only in four of the nine stories is it central. Rather, each one seems to me to focus on either the mother or the son; but whichever it is, we are let deeply into that person's thoughts and see the world through that person's eyes, and mostly it is a sad or even tragic world. A death figures in several of the stories. Some are most evocatively set in various very Irish communities: a criminal one in the first story, an Irish pub in the second, a small village where everyone knows everyone else in others. The long last story is set in the mountains of Spain. All are memorable in their deceptively simple style and in their psychological content.