About the Author

Colm T�ib�n is the author of six novels including The Blackwater Lightship and The Master, both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and the winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His nonfiction includes The Sign of the Times and Love in a Dark Time. He writes frequently for such publications as The London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books. He was a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at New York Public Library, and has taught at Stanford, Princeton, and American universities, as well as the New School, in the United States. His books have been translated into eighteen languages.

Reviews

This latest work from Toibin (www.colmtoibin.com), which follows The Master Mothers and Sons (2006), also available from Blackstone Audio, takes place in the early 1950s and centers on Eilis Lacey, who leaves her hometown of Enniscorthy, Ireland, for Brooklyn, NY, in search of work and a new life. Narrator Kirsten Potter's (www.kirstenpotter.com) smooth voice and affinity for accents pull listeners along through the often plodding narrative. A lightweight work of literary fiction from IMPAC Dublin Literary Award winner Toibin that will appeal to fans of the McCourt brothers and those interested in Irish American history or 1950s Brooklyn. [The Scribner hc was called "more accessible and more sublime than [Toibin's] previous works" and was "highly recommended," LJ 3/15/09.-Ed.]-Donna Bachowski, Orange Cty. Lib. Syst., Orlando, FL Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.

"Reading T�ib�n is like watching an artist paint one small stroke after another until suddenly the finished picture emerges to shattering effect." -- The Times Literary Supplement (U.K.) "A quiet masterpiece." -- The Express (U.K.) "Toibin's prose is as elegant in its simplicity as it is complex in the emotions it evokes." -- The New York Times Magazine "Colm Toibin leads a generation of Irish novelists... His generation's most gifted writer of love's complicated, contradictory power." -- Los Angeles Times "[A] masterly tale... There is not a sentence or a thought out of place." -- Irish Times "A beautifully rendered portrait of Brooklyn and provincial Ireland in the 1950s... Toibin writes about women more convincingly, I think, than any other living, male novelist." -- Zoe Heller, author of The Believers "A classical coming-of-age story, pure, unsensationalized, quietly profound." -- Pam Houston, O, the Oprah Magazine