A Long Winter - by Colm Toibin (Hardcover)

About the Book

"A young man named Miquel returns to his family in the Catalan Pyrenees upon completing his military service. His younger brother, Jordi, will be departing for his service a week after Miquel's arrival. He will be gone for two years. Miquel notices their mother's increasingly erratic behavior and understands that she is drinking. As she becomes increasingly unstable, her husband resorts to drastic measures. Unable to abide his betrayal and her own grief, she walks off into the mountains. A blizzard sets in and the search for her is futile. No one will find her until the spring thaw arrives"--

Book Synopsis

Available for the first time in a beautiful stand-alone edition, one of Colm Tóibín's finest short stories and "the most striking example of Tóibín's emotional control" (The Guardian). A Long Winter is set in the mountains of Catalonia in Spain--this edition includes a new afterword by the author on how he came to write the story.

A young man named Miquel returns to his family in the Catalan Pyrenees upon completing his military service. His younger brother, Jordi, will be departing for his service a week after Miquel's arrival. He will be gone for two years. Miquel notices their mother's increasingly erratic behavior and understands that she is drinking.

As she becomes increasingly unstable, her husband resorts to drastic measures. Unable to abide his betrayal and her own grief, she walks off into the mountains. A blizzard sets in and the search for her is futile. No one will find her until the spring thaw arrives.

A gorgeous story of loss, grief, and longing, "A Long Winter" describes an extraordinary bond between a mother and son and a haunting portrait of a family in crisis. Tóibín's powers of imagination and transfixing emotional insight are on full display.

Review Quotes

Praise for A Long Winter

"A stereophonic treat." --Irish Independent

Praise for Mothers and Sons

"The most striking example of Tóibín's emotional control comes in the last and best story, 'A Long Winter.'" --The Guardian

"These nine tales read like miniature novels; they are so assuredly paced and plangent in tone that it is no exaggeration to compare them to Joyce's classic Dubliners." --The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Brilliant... transfixing." --The New York Times Book Review

"Though each story stands alone--as do the characters--the magic of Mothers and Sons is how beautifully they come together as a whole." --The Miami Herald

"Everything we've come to expect of Tóibín: chilled, sharp prose revealing complex, contradictory feelings, and an equally acute eye for the way character and environment trigger action... A beautiful, seamless, affecting piece of writing." --The Seattle Times

"Colm Tóibín is one of those extraordinary artists whose work is a kind of dramatic dialogue between an icily observant intellect and a tender heart. . . . Mothers and Sons establishes him as a short story writer of first rank." --Los Angeles Times

"An intense, gorgeous collection of thematically linked stories." --Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"In this beautifully unshowy book, Colm Tóibín reveals himself once again as a writer who understands the tenuousness of love and comfort--and, after everything, its necessity." --The New York Review of Books

"Finely crafted, with vivid characters and original stories." --Richmond Times-Dispatch

"Tóibín teases the drama out of the everyday while bringing the extraordinarily dramatic down to a scale that's both easy to grasp and hard to avoid." --The San Diego Union-Tribune

"Wonderfully satisfying and engrossing." --The Irish Times

"Every character, every relationship, is made up of the accretions of an undescribed but palpable past, something that makes them both vividly and solidly real to the reader, and as mysterious as other people always are." --The Sunday Times (London)

"A deeply satisfying and memorable read." --The Globe and Mail

About the Author

Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, including Long Island, an Oprah's Book Club Pick; The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; and Nora Webster, winner of the Hawthornden Prize, as well as three story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and was named the 2022-2024 Laureate for Irish Fiction by the Arts Council of Ireland. In 2021, he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature.