Description

A Guest at the Feast uncovers the places where politics and poetics meet, where life and fiction overlap, where one can be inside writing and also outside of it.

From the melancholy and amusement within the work of the writer John McGahern to an extraordinary essay on his own cancer diagnosis, Toibin delineates the bleakness and strangeness of life and also its richness and its complexity. As he reveals the shades of light and dark in a Venice without tourists and the streets of Buenos Aires riddled with disappearances, we find ourselves considering law and religion in Ireland as well as the intricacies of Marilynne Robinson’s fiction.

The imprint of the written word on the private self, as Toibin himself remarks, is extraordinarily powerful. In this collection, that power is gloriously alive, illuminating history and literature, politics and power, family and the self.

‘Toibin’s voice is so powerful and distinct, his descriptions so precise, that a single thread does weave through each of these pieces and does not snap . . . perhaps Ireland’s greatest living male writer’ Sunday Times

‘An unsurprisingly erudite, gracefully written unpicking of the world’ Independent

Publisher Review

Erudite, forensic, moving and wry . . . the breadth of the collection is impressive: a snapshot of Irish society over decades; Buenos Aires, in the wake of thousands of 'disappeared' people; Covid-era Venice . . . a lesson in how the right words in the right order can get to the truth of the matter * Irish Times * A feast for the reader . . . the novelist applies his inquisitive and empathetic mind in wide-ranging series of essays, from the political to the poignant . . . [Toibin] seeks no lessons; he tries only to be good company on the page. (he succeeds.) * Irish Independent on Saturday * Erudite essays from one of the world's finest writers . . . Throughout, the poetry of Toibin's prose is as impressive as always. In [the] title piece, he writes that his mother was 'what most of us still write for: the ordinary reader, curious and intelligent and demanding, ready to be moved and changed.' Readers like her will savor every page of this book * Kirkus Reviews, starred * I love everything Colm Toibin has written -- Nicola Sturgeon * New Statesman * I wanted to read out loud, to fully savour writing that is so careful and so lyrical -- Laura Hackett * Sunday Times * Reading Irish novelist, playwright and poet Colm Toibin is always a delight * Independent * Both epic and intimate . . . a moving portrait of three generations of sprawling, loving, fractious family life . . . a triumph * Financial Times on The Magician * A work of art, an emotional reckoning with a century of change * The Times on The Magician * I love everything Colm Toibin has written -- Nicola Sturgeon * New Statesman * A work of art, an emotional reckoning with a century of change * The Times on The Magician * Both epic and intimate . . . a moving portrait of three generations of sprawling, loving, fractious family life . . . a triumph * Financial Times on The Magician *