About the Author

Colm Toibin is the author of ten novels, including The Blackwater Lightship; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; The Testament of Mary; and Nora Webster, as well as two story collections, and Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know, a look at three nineteenth-century Irish authors. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. Three times shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Toibin lives in Dublin and New York. The Magician is his most recent work.

Reviews

"A classical coming-of-age story, pure, unsensationalized, quietly profound... There are no antagonists in this novel, no psychodramas, no angst. There is only the sound of a young woman slowly and deliberately stepping into herself, learning to make and stand behind her choices, finding herself."-- "Pam Houston, O, the Oprah Magazine"
"Reading Toibin is like watching an artist paint one small stroke after another until suddenly the finished picture emerges to shattering effect.... Brooklyn stands comparison with Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady."-- "The Times Literary Supplement (U.K.)"
"Toibin ... [is] his generation's most gifted writer of love's complicated, contradictory power."-- "Floyd Skoot, Los Angeles Times"
[A] triumph... One of those magically quiet novels that sneak up on readers and capture their imaginations.-- "USA Today"