Nora Webster: A Novel Audiobook

Quotes

• “Atmospheric…Nora Webster is, like Toibin’s best characters, iconoclastic, strong and deep…Nora is not entirely likable—a self-centered person mired in depression rarely is. But Nora is also proud, fierce, and angry—and slowly, slowly she wins you over. Even more important, she eventually finds a way to save herself. This is not a novel that makes a lot of noise—and yet it’s musical. It has a kind of deliberate, note-by-note crescendo—but very few crashing cymbals—as Nora rediscovers her love of singing, learns how art can help her navigate through grief, and how music can help even the most quiet among us to regain our voice.”

  — Amazon.com, editorial review

• “Richly detailed…Tóibín’s slow pacing results in bright moments of beauty.”

  — New Yorker

• “A high-wire act of an eighth novel…Toibin’s radical restraint elevates what might have been a familiar tale of grief and survival into a realm of heightened inquiry. The result is a luminous, elliptical novel in which everyday life manages, in moments, to approach the mystical…There is much about Nora Webster that we never know. And her very mystery is what makes her regeneration, when it comes, feel universal.”

  — New York Times Book Review

• “[Nora Webster] may actually be a perfect work of fiction… There is no pyrotechny in the writing — just compassion and shrewd insight. Which is where Toibin’s brilliance lies.”

  — Los Angeles Times

• “Fascinating…Revelatory…More thoughtful than Emma Bovary and less self-destructive, in the end far and away a better parent than the doomed Anna Karenina for all the latter’s dramatic posturing, Nora Webster is easily as memorable as either—and far more believable. To say more would spoil a masterful— and unforgettable—novel.”

  — NPR

• “A deeply moving portrait of the flowering of a self-liberated woman, Nora Webster tells the story of all the invisible battles the heart faces every day.”

  — Boston Globe

• “Momentous, made with consummate art…It does everything we ought to ask of a great novel: that it respond to the fullness of our lives, be as large as life itself.”

  — Guardian (London)

• “Each paragraph of these pages rewards rereading, so deftly are they composed and so full of pathos and insight.”

  — Minneapolis Star Tribune

• “A subtle, pitch-perfect sonata of a novel in which an Irish widow faces her empty life and, incrementally, fills the hole left by the recent death of her husband…There’s a spiritual undercurrent here, in the nun who watches over Nora, in the community that provides what she needs (even as she resists), and especially in the music that fills her soul…A novel of mourning, healing, and awakening; its plainspoken eloquence never succumbs to the sentimentality its heroine would reject.”

  — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

• “This sublime melding of author and narrator voices is one of those novels you want to tell everyone about…Fiona Shaw’s lovely narration is both reserved and accessible. She manages the narrative pace in a telling waltz with the plot. And her character voices are instructively chosen. Nora, for instance, audibly expands as the first grief leaves her. The other characters, including a stammering son, shrill colleague, aged nuns, and well-meaning neighbors are also fine miniature portraits. What a magical listening experience. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”

  — AudioFile