Mothers and Sons - by Colm Toibin (Paperback)

About the Book

The award-winning author of "The Master" returns with this psychologically intricate and emotionally incisive collection of stories that tease out the delicate and difficult strands woven between mothers and sons.

Book Synopsis

With dazzling brilliance and empathy, Colm Tóibín's collection of stories wrestles with complicated themes of emotional restraint, the long reach of sexual repression, and the difficulty of escaping one's past.

Each of the nine stories in this beautifully written, intensely intimate collection centers on a transformative moment that alters the delicate balance of power between mother and son, or changes the way they perceive one another. With exquisite grace and eloquence, Tóibín writes of men and women bound by convention, by unspoken emotions, by the stronghold of the past. Many are trapped in lives they would not choose again, if they ever chose at all.

A man buries his mother and converts his grief to desire in one night. A famous singer captivates an audience, yet cannot beguile her own estranged son. And in "A Long Winter," Colm Tóibín's finest piece of fiction to date, a young man searches for his mother in the snow-covered mountains where she has sought escape from the husband who controls and confines her.

Winner of numerous awards for his fifth novel, The Master--including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award--Tóibín brings to this stunning first collection an acute understanding of human frailty and longing. These are haunting, profoundly moving stories by a writer who is himself a master.

Review Quotes

"It's truly remarkable that a writer of Toibin's great felicity, immense seriousness and general large awareness -- a writer so naturally gifted as a novelist -- can deliver short stories of such subtle empathy and brilliance. He's dazzling."
-- Richard Ford

"Tóibín is a subtle, intelligent and deeply felt writer."

-- The Guardian

"Tóibín is a writer of extraordinary emotional clarity....These are beautiful stories, beautifully crafted."

-- Literary Review (uk)

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.