Where to Start with Colm Tóibín: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Colm Tóibín — whether to begin with Brooklyn, The Master, or Nora Webster. A complete reading guide to the Irish novelist's best work.
Colm Tóibín (born 1955) is the finest Irish novelist of his generation — a Wexford-born writer whose novels are distinguished by their formal economy, their emotional restraint, and their precision in rendering the inner lives of characters who cannot fully articulate what they feel. His work spans historical fiction (Henry James, Thomas Mann, the Brontë family, the Virgin Mary) and contemporary Irish life; his prose is always controlled, his sentences always calibrated to convey the maximum feeling through the minimum expression. He is one of the most consistent and accomplished novelists writing in English.
Where to Start: Brooklyn (2009)
The most accessible Tóibín — and his most widely beloved novel. Eilis Lacey leaves Enniscorthy for Brooklyn in the 1950s, arranged by her parish priest and supported by her family in Ireland. She is homesick; she adjusts; she falls in love with Tony Fiorello; she becomes someone she wasn’t before. When a death brings her home, she finds herself pulled toward the life she left — another man, the familiar town, the possibility of not returning to Brooklyn — and must decide who she is and where her life belongs.
The novel is 250 pages of such precision and emotional restraint that it seems much larger. Tóibín’s account of emigration — the self split between two countries, two lives, two selves — is one of the most honest in Irish literature. John Crowley’s film adaptation (2015) with Saoirse Ronan is excellent.
The Master (2004)
Tóibín’s most celebrated novel — a fictional account of Henry James at the most difficult period of his career. After the public humiliation of the failure of his play Guy Domville in 1895, James retreats to Rye and commits himself to fiction, producing his greatest and most difficult novels. Tóibín constructs James’s inner life from his letters, fiction, and biographical record, creating a portrait of a man whose art is both a compensation for and a reflection of his repressed desires — his homosexuality, his inability to love or be loved fully, his acute observation of others as a substitute for participation in life.
A masterclass in literary historical fiction: Tóibín inhabits James’s consciousness without falsifying it, writing prose that matches James’s own intelligence without imitating his style.
Nora Webster (2014)
Tóibín’s most intimate novel — and, for many readers, his finest. Nora Webster is widowed in Enniscorthy in the late 1960s, her husband recently dead, her children needing her, her community surrounding her with well-meaning attention she finds suffocating. The novel traces her gradual emergence: returning to work in a local firm, rediscovering her passion for singing, learning to be alone without being lonely, and slowly reconstructing an identity that is hers rather than her husband’s wife’s.
The novel is extremely quiet — almost nothing ‘happens’ in the conventional narrative sense — and its emotional precision is extraordinary. Tóibín’s account of grief as a process of self-recovery is one of the most accurately observed in fiction.
The Testament of Mary (2012)
A novella — Tóibín’s shortest published work — narrated by the Virgin Mary in old age, giving her account of the events surrounding her son’s death. Mary is a fully human character: frightened, grieving, skeptical of the story the disciples are building around her son’s death, and unwilling to endorse the miracle narrative they require of her. The novella is Tóibín’s most formally radical work: spare, concentrated, and structured around the silences of a woman who has been spoken for rather than listened to. Ninety pages of exceptional force.
Reading Colm Tóibín
Tóibín’s defining quality is restraint — his characters’ most intense feelings are conveyed through what is not said, what is avoided, what cannot be expressed. This makes him an initially quiet novelist whose emotional impact accumulates slowly and registers deeply. Begin with Brooklyn for the most immediate access to his gifts; continue with The Master for the historical depth; read Nora Webster for the most intimate account of his central theme — the solitary self’s negotiation with loss and community. All four novels listed here are essential.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Colm Tóibín?
Brooklyn (2009) is both the most widely read and the best starting point — a short, perfectly constructed novel about Eilis Lacey, a young Irish woman who emigrates to Brooklyn in the 1950s, falls in love, and is then pulled back to Ireland by a family crisis, forced to choose between her old life and her new one. It is Tóibín at his most accessible and his most emotionally precise. The Master (2004), his novel about Henry James, is the best starting point for readers who want his historical fiction; Nora Webster for his most intimate portrait of grief.
What is Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín about?
Brooklyn (2009) follows Eilis Lacey, a young woman from Enniscorthy in County Wexford, who emigrates to Brooklyn in the 1950s at the arrangement of her parish priest. She is homesick, then gradually adjusts, then falls in love with Tony Fiorello, an Italian-American plumber. When a death brings her home to Ireland, she is unexpectedly pulled back toward the life she left — a different kind of man, the possibility of not returning. The novel is Tóibín's account of what emigration costs: the self that is left behind, the life that is not lived, and the choice that cannot be unmade once made.
What is The Master about?
The Master (2004) is a fictional account of five years (1895–1900) in the life of Henry James — the years following the public failure of his play Guy Domville, when James retreated from society and committed himself fully to fiction. Tóibín uses James's fiction, letters, and biographical record to construct an intimate portrait of his inner life: his repressed homosexuality, his acute observation of others, his painful relationships with his family, and the way his art became both a compensation for and a reflection of what he could not allow himself to experience directly. One of the finest literary biographical novels ever written.
Is Nora Webster a sequel to Brooklyn?
Nora Webster (2014) is not a sequel to Brooklyn but an independent novel set in the same County Wexford milieu. Nora Webster is a widow in Enniscorthy in the late 1960s — her husband Maurice has recently died, leaving her with four children and financial anxiety. The novel follows her gradual, quiet emergence from grief: returning to work, rediscovering her voice as a singer, negotiating her relationships with her children and her community. It is Tóibín's most autobiographical novel (his father died when he was young) and his most intimate — a portrait of grief as a slow process of learning to be oneself again.
