A beautifully written collection of stories about mother/son relationships. Thoroughly absorbing and moving.
June 2010 Guest Editor Patrick Gale on Colm Toibin...
Admirers of Toibin’s novels won’t feel short-changed here for, like Chekhov and Carver, his grasp of the short story form is so confident that each story packs the emotional wallop of a novel. The only problem is that many are so strong, so moving, that you can’t read them back-to-back but need time off to recover.
From the internationally celebrated author of The Master, winner of the 2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.Mothers and Sons is a deeply penetrating and beautifully written meditation on the dramas surrounding this most elemental of relationships. Each of the nine stories focuses on a moment in which an unspoken balance shifts; in which a mother or son do battle, or experience a sudden crisis, thus leaving their conception of who they are subtly or seriously altered. A son buries his mother and goes out to a drug-fuelled rave on a remote beach near Dublin. A mother sings about treacherous love to a rapt crowd of musicians in a local pub. And in A Long Winter, Colm Tibns finest piece of fiction to date, a man goes searching for his mother in the snow-covered Pyrenees.Psychologically intricate and emotionally incisive, each finely wrought story teases out the delicate and difficult strands woven between mothers and sons. This is an acute, masterful, and moving collection that confirms Tibn as a great prose stylist of our time.From the Hardcover edition.
'Colm Toibin is a writer of extraordinary emotional clarity. Each of the nine stories is a snapshot of a point of crisis ...Toibin perfectly understands the instantaneous nature of the ideal short story; the sense that the pen is going straight into a major vein. These are beautiful stories, beautifully crafted' - Kate Saunders, Literary Review
'The last story in this excellent collection is a superbly powerful tale of betrayal and desertion. Quintessential Toibin' - Spectator
'Moving ...beautifully captured moments of longing and loss ...Toibin is a subtle, intelligent and deeply felt writer' - Guardian
'By turns surprising and illuminating, always beautifully written, Mothers and Sons places Toibin in the front rank of modern Irish fiction ...It may not be going too far to suggest Irish fiction has found its first Master of the new century' - Scotland on Sunday
Author
About Colm Toibin
Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy in 1955. He is the author of eight novels including Blackwater Lightship, The Master and The Testament of Mary, all three of which were nominated for the Booker Prize, with The Master also winning the IMPAC Award, and Brooklyn, which won the Costa Novel Award. He has also published two collections of stories and many works of non-fiction. His most recent novel is Nora Webster. He lives in Dublin.
