The Empty Family: Stories

From the internationally celebrated author of Brooklyn and The Master, and winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, comes a stunning new book of fiction. In the captivating stories that make up The Empty Family, Colm Tóibín delineates with a tender and unique sensibility the lives of unspoken or unconscious longing, of individuals often willingly cast adrift from their history. From the young Pakistani immigrant who seeks some kind of permanence in a strange town, to the Irish woman reluctantly returning to Dublin and discovering a city that refuses to acknowledge her long absence, each of Tóibín's stories manage to contain whole worlds: stories of fleeing the past and returning home, of family threads lost and ultimately regained. Like Tóibín's celebrated novels, and his previous short story collection, Mothers and Sons, reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, The Empty Family will further confirm Tóibín's status as "his generation's most gifted writer of love's complicated, contradictory power." (Los Angeles Times)

"Tóibín returns to his native shores from Brooklyn for the bulk of these nine pristine stories, all — save one — contemporary tales of lives haunted by loss, whether it's the legacy of a sexually abusive priest in an already complicated love triangle in 'The Pearl Fishers,' the long-absent gay son who returns to Dublin from New York to attend to his mother's last moments in 'One Minus One,' or the aching void that greets an academic's return to a family home on the Irish coast in the wistful title story. Affairs, airports, and deathbeds populate a mature prose that's as tender with descriptions of sexual, often gay, love as it is with the heart's more inexpressible reaches, never more so than in the complex 'The Street,' where two Pakistanis find love in the repressive backdrop of blue-collar Barcelona only to be met with violence and a curious captivity. These stories go a long way toward establishing Tóibín as heir to William Trevor, with reverberations that show how life encompasses more than the living. (Jan.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright PWyxz LLC)

"Befitting an author who straddles cultures...he peoples his stories with characters trying to navigate between different countries, often involving some reconciliation of a past and present....Likely to rank with the best story collections of the year." Kirkus Reviews

"This book, then, is short story writing as dazzling yet serious as it is practiced today. (Starred Review)" Booklist

"Tóibín's characteristically lyrical prose seems even more elegantly economical in this volume; this spareness enhances the beauty, sometimes aching, that emerges from observations and dialog....Tóibín exhibits his familiar stylistic simplicity while extending his emotional reach." Library Journal

The acclaimed author of the novels The South and The Blackwater Lightship presents a new collection of short stories.

Colm Tóibín is the author of four previous novels, The South, The Heather Blazing, The Story of the Night, and The Blackwater Lightship, which was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize. He lives in Dublin.

Silence — The empty family — Two women — One minus one — The pearl fishers — Barcelona, 1975 — The new Spain — The colour of shadows — The street.