Colm Toibin

"The Magician opens at the turn of the twentieth century in a provincial German city where the young boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative, conventional father and a Brazilian mother, exotic and unpredictable, who will never fit in. He hides both his artistic aspirations and his homosexual desires from this father, and his sexuality from everyone. He longs for the charismatic, beautiful, rich, cultured young Jewish man, but marries his twin...

"Summering with a fellow schoolboy on a great English estate, Leo, the hero of L.P. Hartley's finest novel, encounters a world of unimagined luxury. But when his friend's beautiful older sister enlists him as the unwitting messenger in her illicit love affair, the aftershocks will be felt for years. The inspiration for the brilliant Joseph Losey/Harold Pinter film starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, The Go-Between is a masterpiece - a richly layered,...

Presents a fictionalized study based upon the many biographical materials and family accounts of nineteenth-century novelist Henry James and examines his life of loneliness, despair, and failed relationships.

"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...