© People's Literature Publishing House, 2012
The nine stories in Tóibín's collection, The Empty Family, subtly explore themes of exile and return, death and loss, his protagonists unable to escape the past and discovering that home is not where they thought it was.
'Home' in the stories alternates between settings abroad (London, Barcelona, New York) and in Ireland (Wexford and Dublin). In the opening story, "Silence", Lady Gregory, the Irish poet and playwright, entertains Henry James over dinner with a heavily embroidered version of a long-ago love affair over which she still suffers. In "One Minus One", a monologue addressed to a former lover, the narrator recalls a time when he was plucked from his promising new life in Manhattan to return to his old life in Ireland, where his mother was dying. In the title story "The Empty Family", the protagonist mixes vague recollections of a former lover with the discovery of a stone on the beach, which he notes has been battered by time yet is "all the more alive for that, as though the battle between colour and water had offered it a mute strength." As Thomas Jones observed in his review for the Guardian, "for Tóibín, memory seems not merely a function of the heart but proof that the heart exists," their engagements with the past allowing his characters to gain a clear vision rather than comfort.
Viking 2010
Translated into: French, Chinese – Simplified, Bulgarian
Rogers, Coleridge & White Literary Agency
20 Powis Mews
London W11 1JN
United Kingdom
Email: stephen@rcwlitagency.co.uk
Website: www.rcwlitagency.co.uk
French, Chinese – Simplified, Bulgarian