Mothers and Sons

"Toibin is a writer of extraordinary emotional clarity... These are beautiful stories, beautifully crafted" (Literary Review)

Mothers and Sons is a sensitive and beautifully written meditation on the dramas surrounding this most elemental of relationships. Each of the nine stories focuses on a moment in which an unspoken balance shifts; in which a mother or son do battle, or experience a sudden crisis, thus leaving their conception of who they are subtly or seriously altered.

A son buries his mother and goes out to a drug-fuelled rave on a remote beach near Dublin. In the course of this one night his grief and desire for raw feeling combine with exquisite intensity. A mother sings about treacherous love to a rapt crowd of musicians in a local pub. Her unacknowledged son meets her eyes, unable to approach her. And in A Long Winter, Colm Toibin's finest piece of fiction to date, a son goes searching for his mother in the snow-covered Pyrenees.

Psychologically intricate and emotionally incisive, each finely wrought story teases out the delicate and difficult strands woven between mothers and sons. This is an acute, masterful and moving collection that confirms Toibin as a great prose stylist of our time.