Book list
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For the celebrated Irish writer Tóibín (Long Island, 2024), his homeland is always a looming presence. Even in these stories, which primarily feature characters traveling, relocated, or otherwise elsewhere, Tóibín remains a quintessential Irish author. Themes of class, family, and identity are inexorably entwined with those of guilt, shame, and separation. A boarding-school-student-turned-thief is plagued by his conscience. A young woman is impregnated by an itinerant soldier. A man moves to a different country after committing a horrendous act but fears being recognized. The capstone novella follows three sisters who have emigrated to Argentina and their efforts to assimilate. Tóibín is a master of lucid, exacting prose; his finely calibrated sentences often move forward with a gentle inevitability while resisting ornament in favor of emotional accuracy. This style creates a tone that mirrors thought itself: hesitant, recursive, alert to contradiction. The disciplined calm of the prose adds to the stories' suggestion that lives are most decisively altered not by dramatic announcements but by what is absorbed slowly, through attention and memory.

Publishers Weekly
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The protagonists of these finely crafted stories from Tóibín (Long Island) reflect on their lives and how they wound up where they are. For the aging Irish narrator and his younger Jewish American lover in “Sleep,” it was “Germany, Ireland, the internet, gay rights, Judaism, Catholicism: they have all brought us here. To this room, to this bed in America.” In “The Journey to Galway,” an Irishwoman grapples with grief in the wake of WWII. The story begins with the unnamed woman noting an “unusual silence,” and her tale comprises painful recollections of those she lost in the war. “A Free Man” follows Joe, a failed Maynooth pontifical student and former math teacher, from Ireland to Barcelona, where he hopes to start a new life following a lengthy prison term for molesting teen boys. “The Catalan Girls,” a novella, centers on discreet and resolute Montse, who, as a 10-year-old, migrates with her mother and elder sisters Conxita and Núria (“the rude one”) from Spain to Argentina only to return 50 years later. The quiet humanity of Tóibín’s characters is as arresting as his knack for rendering relationships and place. This collection offers much to admire. Agent: Peter Straus, RCW Literary. (Mar.)

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Nine new stories from the author ofBrooklyn (2009) andLong Island (2024). Known for his rich novels of the Irish at home and abroad, as well as his fictionalized portraits of writers Henry James and Thomas Mann, Tóibín is just as adept at the short story—indeed, his understated prose shines in miniature. Two tales in this new collection glancingly intersect with the world of his Enniscorthy novels, introducing characters familiar to readers ofNora Webster (2014). In the title story, Nora’s husband, Maurice, visits the Irish Assembly, or Dáil, hoping to petition a minister for access to a tuberculosis drug that might save his dying brother. Readers are afforded a fly-on-the-wall perspective on Irish politics; Eamon de Valera, president of Ireland in the 1960s, makes a cameo. “A Sum of Money,” in which a hard-up boarding school student begins pilfering cash from his classmates’ lockers, name-checks Nora and Maurice’s son, Donal. Not all the stories are set in the past: “Sleep” concerns a gay man who submits to being hypnotized by a psychiatrist after his younger lover leaves him, while “Five Bridges” features a sad-sack middle-aged Irishman, living in San Francisco without documentation, who must return to his homeland, leaving behind the tween daughter he’s only just getting to know. The longest tale, “The Catalan Girls,” is the least successful of the bunch, following three sisters through the decades after they leave Spain and emigrate to Buenos Aires; it lacks the narrative tension to pull readers through its 100-plus pages. But “A Free Man,” about an Irish schoolteacher convicted of sexual abuse who relocates to Barcelona after serving his prison term, is among the author’s finest work; it’s dark, ambiguous, and quietly, profoundly unsettling. A distillation of Tóibín’s melancholy, unadorned style. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.