The Empty Family

Colm Tóibín’s most recent novel, Brooklyn, told the story of a young woman who leaves a small town in Ireland in the 1950s for the uncertainties of a new life in America.

When a death in the family summons her back to Enniscorthy, she has to make an apparently impossible choice between two places, both – and therefore neither – of which she thinks of as home.

The nine stories in Tóibín’s new collection, The Empty Family, explore similar themes: of exile and return, death and loss, irreconcilable love affairs and conflicting loyalties, the differences between the families we’re born into and those we choose for ourselves, or would if we could.