Publisher Description
From the internationally celebrated author of Brooklyn and The Master and winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award comes a stunning new book of fiction.
In the captivating stories that make up The Empty Family, Colm Tóibín delineates with a tender and unique sensibility, lives of unspoken or unconscious longing, of individuals often willingly cast adrift from their history. From the young Pakistani immigrant who seeks some kind of permanence in a strange town, to the Irish woman reluctantly returning to Dublin and discovering a city that refuses to acknowledge her long absence, each of Toibin’s stories manage to contain whole worlds: stories of fleeing the past and returning home, of family threads lost and ultimately regained.
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“[The Empty Family] reconfirms his mastery of the short story—Tóibín raised his profile with the exquisitely bittersweet Brooklyn, and this collection is every bit as rich…Likely to rank with the best story collections of the year.”
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Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
About Colm Tóibín
Colm Tóibín is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, journalist, critic, and poet. His novel The Master won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. His other books of fiction have earned similar awards and have been translated into numerous languages. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.
About the Narrators
Tim Gerard Reynolds is an established audiobook narrator who has won several AudioFile Earphones Awards and was a finalist for the prestigious Audie Award for Best Fantasy Narration. He trained for the stage at the Samuel Beckett Center at Trinity College in Dublin and the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center in New London, Connecticut.
Neil Hellegers grew up in New Jersey and attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a BA in theater arts and a minor in psychology before getting an MFA in acting from the Trinity Rep Conservatory in Providence, Rhode Island. He moved to New York City in 2003 and, since then, has made a career of theatrical performance, percussion, theater education, and audiobook narration. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.
Jeff Woodman is an actor and narrator. He is a winner of the prestigious Audie Award and a six-time finalist. He has received twenty Earphones Awards and was named the 2008 Best Voice in Fiction & Classics, as well as one of the Fifty Greatest Voices of the Century by AudioFile magazine. As an actor, he originated the title role in Tennessee Williams’ The Notebook of Trigorin and won the S. F. Critics’ Circle Award for his performance in An Ideal Husband. In addition to numerous theater credits on and off Broadway, his television work includes Sex and the City, Law & Order, and Cosby.
Alma Cuervo is an Earphones Award–winning narrator and a stage actress and singer who has also performed in film and television. She holds an MFA in acting from the Yale School of Drama, from which she graduated in 1976 alongside Meryl Streep. She starred in the role of Madame Morrible in the first national tour of Wicked.
John Keating is an actor, voice talent, and AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator. His numerous acting credits include Roundabout Theatre’s production of Juno and the Paycock and La Mama ETC’s production of Cat and the Moon, as well as various parts with the Irish Repertory Theater and the Irish Arts Center. He can also be seen in the HBO miniseries John Adams, starring Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney.
Piter Marek is an Lebanon-born American actor known for his role as Jamal Alhabi on the hit television show Castle. Marek grew up in Long Island, New York, and later graduated with a degree in theater from Queens College.
Terry
Donnelly is a narrator and an actress who has appeared on television in Law & Order. She is the narrator of
more than a dozen audiobooks, and her reading of Quentins by Maeve Binchy was a finalist in 2003 for the prestigious
Audie Award in the category of Solo Narration – Female. She earned an AudioFile Earphones Award for her reading of The Gathering by Anne Enright in
which she was praised for “capturing [the author’s] every subtlety.”