Next month’s Book Club takes place on Mon, 25th February at 7pm at the London Irish Centre and we will be discussing The Empty Family by Colm Toibin. The book is available to buy online and can also be found in most good bookshops:
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.
‘I imagined lamplight, shadows, soft voices, clothes put away, the low sound of late news on the radio. And I thought as I crossed the bridge at Baggot Street to face the last stretch of my own journey home that no matter what I had done, I had not done that.
‘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 Tóibín’s stories manage to contain whole worlds: stories of fleeing the past and returning home, of family threads lost and ultimately regained.
‘Exquisite . . . The chief reason to read these stories is the peculiar power of Colm Tóibín’s prose’ Telegraph
‘Astonishingly precise, depicting complex and conflicted states of mind with rare clarity’ Observer ‘Beautifully observed’ Sunday Times
Also a quick reminder of our next set of dates:
Mon 25th March
Mon 22nd April
Mon 20th May
Mon 24th June
Thanks for reading!
