The News from Dublin: Stories

by Colm Tóibín

Overview

From Colm Tóibín, “one of the world’s best living literary writers” (The Boston Globe), comes a brilliant collection of nine short stories, many never-before-published, set across Ireland, Spain, and America—about the complexities of family, longing, loss, and love.

Celebrated as “his generation’s most gifted writer of love’s complicated, contradictory power” (Los Angeles Times), Colm Tóibín is a master of short fiction as well as the novel, able to summon an extraordinary intensity of emotion in a brief tale. The eleven stories transport readers across continents and eras.

In “The Journey to Galway,” a mother who has learned of the death of her son, a fighter pilot in WWII, travels to Galway to inform his wife and their three now fatherless children. “Sleep,” originally published in The New Yorker, explores the rift between two lovers as one of them cannot reckon with his grief and fear after the death of his brother. Death, again, is a central character in the title story, “The News from Dublin,” as Maurice Webster travels to Dublin to try to save his younger brother who is dying of tuberculosis. Maurice must petition the health minister for access to a new experimental drug, and this is the only hope.

Tóibín’s stories are rich with the complexities of family dynamics, the haunting pull of the past, and the quiet revelations that define our lives. His characters, whether navigating the aftermath of war, or forbidden love, or the desires of a girl in Catalan, or the quiet struggles mundane life, are rendered with illuminating, unforgettable empathy and insight.

The News from Dublin is an exquisite introduction to Tóibín’s short fiction for new readers who may have discovered Tóibín with the publication of Long Island, and a glorious new collection for longtime fans of this “achingly beautiful writer...with infinite compassion” (The Miami Herald).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781476785141
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	03/31/2026
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.38(h) x 0.74(d)

About the Author

Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, including Long Island, an Oprah’s Book Club Pick; The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; and Nora Webster, winner of the Hawthornden Prize, as well as three story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and was named the 2022–2024 Laureate for Irish Fiction by the Arts Council of Ireland. In 2021, he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Empty Family

“A perfect introduction to Tóibín and, for longtime fans, a bracing pleasure.” —The Seattle Times

“Magic... haunting, evocative, sad, rich with complex humanity.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Tóibín’s attention to language equals the empathy he pays his thoroughly authentic characters, so summarizing their stories only threatens to blunt their exquisiteness, because half the pleasure of reading them comes from absorbing the complicated structures he weaves... He is in top form here.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Love in all its guises—nostalgic, unabashedly erotic, perhaps even autobiographical—can be found in The Empty Family, including a deft reimagining of Lady Gregory’s tryst with the poet Wilfred Blunt, recounted with more than one Jamesian flourish.” —Vogue

"Tóibín lures us into stories with characters who experience true revelation, no matter how quiet or small. With masterful restraint, he lays bare the drama of everyday life.” —Houston Chronicle

“Nine achingly beautiful stories... With The Empty Family Tóibín takes the morass of humanity and with infinite compassion distills it into art.” —The Miami Herald

“The Empty Family reminds us that a short story is something altogether different: a work of art, like a painting or a beautiful song. Ernest Hemingway famously said that in fiction nine-tenths of the story should lie below the surface... Tóibín masterfully achieves this goal.” —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Tóibín generates drama and suspense without ever sacrificing the intensely lyrical writing that he has always delivered.” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“With a spare, eloquent style, Tóibín guides us through hotel lobbies and pensiones from Dublin to Barcelona. He directs our attention to estranged family members, divorcées and Muslim immigrants, catching each of them at the moment in which they are forced to reckon with their pasts.” —Los Angeles Times

“Mr. Tóibín is at his best dealing with matters of the heart and soul... A satisfying test of intellect and sympathy.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“On the evidence of the stories collected in The Empty Family, Colm Tóibín must be seriously considered one of today’s great short story writers... Tóibín is shaping up to be the early twenty-first century’s E. M. Forster.” —American-Statesman

“Rich with tender surprises... Tóibín’s voice is more assured with every new book he brings out.” —The Economist

“The work of a supreme writer who only improves.” —The Times (London)

“A collection that will only further fuel Tóibín’s ascent through English fiction.” —The Independent

“Exquisite.” —The Daily Telegraph

“Narratives of remarkable scope and variety... Tóibín describes the experiences of the young and the very old, homosexual and heterosexual, Irish and Spanish, all with equal assurance.” —The Spectator

“Colm Tóibín is one of the best storytellers writing today... His prose is pitch perfect, each word, each phrase carefully chosen and aptly applied... In this collection Colm Tóibín is at his masterful best.” —Toronto Sun

“When Tóibín pulls a fully convincing twist on the convention, it’s like witnessing a magician pull off an especially deft trick... The work of a modern master.” —The Gazette (Canada)

Praise for Mothers and Sons

“Brilliant... transfixing.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Though each story stands alone—as do the characters—the magic of Mothers and Sons is how beautifully they come together as a whole.” —The Miami Herald

“Everything we’ve come to expect of Tóibín: chilled, sharp prose revealing complex, contradictory feelings, and an equally acute eye for the way character and environment trigger action... A beautiful, seamless, affecting piece of writing.” —The Seattle Times

“Colm Tóibín is one of those extraordinary artists whose work is a kind of dramatic dialogue between an icily observant intellect and a tender heart. . . . Mothers and Sons establishes him as a short story writer of first rank.” —Los Angeles Times

“An intense, gorgeous collection of thematically linked stories.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“In this beautifully unshowy book, Colm Tóibín reveals himself once again as a writer who understands the tenuousness of love and comfort—and, after everything, its necessity.” —The New York Review of Books

“These nine tales read like miniature novels; they are so assuredly paced and plangent in tone that it is no exaggeration to compare them to Joyce’s classic Dubliners.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Finely crafted, with vivid characters and original stories.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Tóibín teases the drama out of the everyday while bringing the extraordinarily dramatic down to a scale that’s both easy to grasp and hard to avoid.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune

“Wonderfully satisfying and engrossing.” —The Irish Times

“Tóibín is a subtle, intelligent and deeply felt writer.” —The Guardian

“Every character, every relationship, is made up of the accretions of an undescribed but palpable past, something that makes them both vividly and solidly real to the reader, and as mysterious as other people always are.” —The Sunday Times (London)

“A deeply satisfying and memorable read.” —The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

Praise for Long Island

"I was captivated. A wonderful page-turner to start your summer reading.” —Oprah Winfrey

“A brilliant novel. Beautifully crafted... makes for a riveting, wonderful read.” —Elizabeth Strout, The Guardian

“Eilis is an interesting and vivid character because she manages to make her destiny her choice... In her own mind, and in the eyes of sympathetic readers, she is free.” —New York Times Book Review

“Deeply felt but resolutely unsentimental... Tóibín uses masterly restraint to dramatize how lives can be destabilized by desire.” —The New Yorker

“Stunning.” —People

"Tóibín, a master of his art, exploits to exquisite effect at the end, leaving us to wonder, yet again, what’s next.” —Los Angeles Times

“Momentous and hugely affecting. These pendant novels, will be the fiction for which this wonderful writer is best remembered.” —Wall Street Journal

"Tóibín has created a novel not to be missed.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Rich and doubly suspenseful... Tóibín, a master of his art, exploits to exquisite effect at the end, leaving us to wonder, yet again, what’s next.” —Los Angeles Times

“Dazzling yet devastating... Tóibín is simply one of the world’s best living literary writers...” —The Boston Globe

"Entrancing... riveting from the first page." —The Economist

“About secrets and dreams and the conflict of desire over duty... Long Island is a wonder, rich with yearning and regret.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Tóibín’s storytelling is rich and full of tension as he explores the complexities of life, the decisions we make, and the consequences that result.” —Glamour

“The quiet, moving story is told from the perspectives of different characters, each with a heartbreaking inability to express what they truly desire.” —AARP

“Fifteen years ago, Colm Tóibín won readers’ hearts with his best-selling novel Brooklyn. Now, with the sequel, Long Island, he just might break them... Tóibín writes beautifully about the struggle between the comfort of the familiar and the hope for something better.” —Columbia Magazine

“Tóibín’s latest sees the return of one of his most beloved heroines from his novel Brooklyn and deftly explores the longings of a woman who finds herself alone in her tilted marriage.” —The Chicago Review of Books

From the Publisher