Colm Tóibín

"It is Enniscorthy in the southeast of Ireland in the early 1950s. Eilis Lacey is one among many of her generation who cannot find work at home. Thus when a job is offered in America, it is clear to everyone that she must go. Leaving her family and country, Eilis heads for unfamiliar Brooklyn, and to a crowded boarding house where the landlady's intense scrutiny and the small jealousies of her fellow residents only deepen her isolation. Slowly, however,...

A collection of short fiction includes "The Street," in which Pakistani workers in Barcelona pursue a taboo affair; and "Two Women," in which a taciturn Irish set designer confronts repressed emotions while working in her homeland.

"A wide variety of poems, ranging in setting and topic, Vinegar Hill deals with gay experience and with the experience of loss, with memory and a fading past as well as the present moment"-- Provided by publisher.

"In this book, novelist Colm Tóibín offers a deeply personal introduction to the work and life of one of his most important literary influences--the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Ranging across her poetry, prose, letters, and biography, Tóibín creates a vivid picture of Bishop while also revealing how her work has helped shape his sensibility as a novelist and how her experiences of loss and exile resonate with his own. What emerges is a compelling...

"The Blackwater Lightship" is set in the early 1990s in an old house in Ireland. Helen and her family have gathered there to care for her brother, who is dying of AIDS. A portrayal of a family at war with itself, whose storytelling and truth revealing may be able to heal all their wounds.

"Con la templanza, el virtuosismo y la perspicacia psicológica del maestro contemporáneo que es, Colm Tóibín, uno de los mejores escritores irlandeses de nuestros días, ha construido una historia estremecedora sobre el destino cuya diáfana superficie esconde un fondo donde se abisma una complejidad inagotable. Eilis Lacey es una chica de familia humilde que, como tantos otros, no encuentra trabajo en el pequeño pueblo del sudeste de Irlanda...

"In 1950 Katherine Proctor leaves Ireland for Barcelona, determined to escape her family and become a painter. There she meets Miguel, an anarchist veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and begins to build a life with him. But Katherine cannot escape her past, as Michael Graves, a fellow Irish emigre in Spain, forces her to reexamine all her relationships: to her lover, her art, and the homeland she only thought she knew"--Page 4 of cover.

The authors reveal their picks for the best American and English novels published since 1950, including works by such writers as Jane Smiley, Patrick White, Anne Tyler, Anthony Powell, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo.

"In a quiet Italian town after World War Two, Elsa lives with her parents in the house where she was born. Twenty-seven and unmarried, she is a constant concern to her obsessive, hypochondriac mother. But her mother does not know that Elsa has fallen in love with Tommasino, the elusive youngest son of the De Francisci family, who own the textile factory that dominates the town. Over the course of their secret meetings, Elsa begins to imagine a future...