Toibin's descriptions of Ireland are captivating and really capture the essence. The stories are haunting and admiringly describe/detail the complex parent-child relatiionships. I don't think you need to be a mother or a son to relate. (

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Bridget770 | Nov 1, 2009 |

Thoughtful restrained writing about telling moments in the relationships between mothers and sons.
For me the early stories were better, with their music backgrounds, and the final story set in Spain did not work for me, but overall a very enjoyable collection. (

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CarltonC | Aug 28, 2009 |

An insightful collection of stories about such diverse people as a hardened Irish thief, a Spanish son and father whose mother and wife has disappeared, a widow turned successful businesswoman, and the mother of a disgraced priest. Toibin immerses us in the lives of the narrators, each with a distinctive voice and story. (

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Hagelstein | Sep 24, 2008 |

"A boy's best friend is his mother," covered in a variety of ways by one of the best Irish writers of our time.

Toibin's Ireland is _not_ the "happy Ireland" of the tourist books, but is a mournful place full of Joycian "The Dead-ish" memories.

The longest story, "The Long Winter," is set in Franco's Spain, and is very very good, but feels as if it is part of a longer novel still in gestation. (

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yooperprof | Sep 19, 2008 |

Often I had to search for the mother-son relationship in these stories, because I was looking for a more traditional, warm bond between mothers and their sons, until I found that in these stories it is all about moments at which this bond is disturbed, often even severed. Beautiful prose. What annoyed me was the abrupt ending of several stories, which left me feeling that I missed something. Or can it be that Toibin just wants to focus on those moments of severence? (

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Leosbooks | May 3, 2008 |

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Ireland

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Awards and honors

New York Times Notable Book of the Year (Fiction & Poetry, 2007)

Edge Hill Short Story Prize (2007)

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Disambiguation notice

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Mothers and Sons

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Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 077108532X, Paperback)

From the internationally celebrated author of The Master, winner of the 2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Mothers and Sons is a deeply penetrating 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. A mother sings about treacherous love to a rapt crowd of musicians in a local pub. And in “A Long Winter,” Colm Tóibín’s finest piece of fiction to date, a man 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 Tóibín as a great prose stylist of our time.

From the Hardcover edition.

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:51 -0400)

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