Audiobooks Narrated by Colm Tóibín

A Guest at the Feast

Brought to you by Penguin. In his essay about the life of Irish writer John McGahern, Tóibín reveals the tones of melancholy and amusement within both art and the artist. In his extraordinary essay on his cancer diagnosis, Tóibín unpicks the word 'battle', and illuminates the distress, horror and blankness of his experiences. From the shades of light and dark in a Venice without tourists, to the streets of Buenos Aires riddled with disappearances and tied up with dictators and politics, we find ourselves considering law and religion in Ireland as well as in Marilynne Robinson's fiction. A Guest at the Feast reveals the places where politics and poetics meet, where life and fiction overlap, where one can be inside writing and also outside of it. The imprint of the written word on the private self, as Tóibín himself remarks, is extraordinarily powerful. In this collection, that power is gloriously alive, illuminating history and literature, politics and power, family and the self. © Colm Tóibín 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Colm Tóibín (Author), Colm Tóibín (Narrator)

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Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know written and read by Colm Tóibín. 'A father...is a necessary evil.' Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses In Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know, Colm Tóibín turns his incisive gaze to three of Ireland's greatest writers, Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats and James Joyce, and their earliest influences: their fathers. From Wilde's doctor father, a brilliant statistician and amateur archaeologist, who was taken to court by an obsessed lover in a strange premonition of what would happen to his son; to Yeats' father, an impoverished artist and brilliant letter-writer who could never finish apainting; to John Stanislus Joyce, a singer, drinker and story-teller, a man unwilling to provide for his large family, whom his son James memorialised in his work. Colm Tóibín illuminates not only the complex relationships between three of the greatest writers in the English language and their fathers, but also illustrates the surprising ways they surface in their work. If there is a more brilliant writer than Tóibín working today, I don't know who that would be - Karen Joy Fowler Toibin is a supple, subtle thinker, alive to hints and undertones, wary of absolute truths - New Statesman A consistently revealing look at how writers' relationships have influenced their work - Sunday Telegraph on 'New Ways to Kill Your Mother' A wide-ranging and enlightening study of the potentially stifling family and the individual spirit of the writer - Sunday Times on 'New Ways to Kill Your Mother'

Colm Tóibín (Author), Colm Tóibín (Narrator)

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A Guest at the Feast: A Memoir

The unabridged downloadable audiobook edition of Colm Tóibín's touching memoir, A Guest at the Feast, beautifully read by the author himself. A Guest at the Feast moves from the small town of Enniscorthy to Dublin, from memories of a mother who always had a book on the go to the author's early adulthood, from a love of literature to the influences of place and family. Tóibín's captivating memoir is the story of a writer coming of age and his connections between home, work and love. It is a perfect gem of a book.

Colm Tóibín (Author), Colm Tóibín (Narrator)

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