The News from Dublin

From Colm Tóibín, “one of the world’s best living literary writers” (The Boston Globe), comes a brilliant collection of nine short stories, many never-before-published, set across Ireland, Spain, and America—about the complexities of family, longing, loss, and love. Celebrated as “his generation’s most gifted writer of love’s complicated, contradictory power” (Los Angeles Times), Colm Tóibín is a master of short fiction as well as the novel, able to summon an extraordinary intensity of emotion in a brief tale. The eleven stories transport readers across continents and eras. In “The Journey to Galway,” a mother who has learned of the death of her son, a fighter pilot in World War I, travels to Galway to inform his wife and their three now fatherless children. “Sleep,” originally published in The New Yorker, explores the rift between two lovers as one of them cannot reckon with his grief and fear after the death of his brother. Death, again, is a central character in the title story, “The News from Dublin,” as Maurice Webster travels to Dublin to try to save his younger brother who is dying of tuberculosis. Maurice must petition the health minister for access to a new experimental drug, and this is the only hope. Tóibín’s stories are rich with the complexities of family dynamics, the haunting pull of the past, and the quiet revelations that define our lives. His characters, whether navigating the aftermath of war, or forbidden love, or the desires of a girl in Catalan, or the quiet struggles mundane life, are rendered with illuminating, unforgettable empathy and insight. The News from Dublin is an exquisite introduction to Tóibín’s short fiction for new readers who may have discovered Tóibín with the publication of Long Island, and a glorious new collection for longtime fans of this “achingly beautiful writer…with infinite compassion” (The Miami Herald).

Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, including Long Island, an Oprah’s Book Club Pick; The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; and Nora Webster, winner of the Hawthornden Prize, as well as three story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and was named the 2022–2024 Laureate for Irish Fiction by the Arts Council of Ireland. In 2021, he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature.