The Empty Family: Stories

By Colm Toibin

From the internationally celebrated author of Brooklyn and The Master, and winner of the International Dublin Literary Award, comes a stunning new book of fiction.

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. 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.

Like Tóibín's celebrated novels, and his previous short story collection, Mothers and Sons, reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, The Empty Family will further confirm Tóibín's status as "his generation's most gifted writer of love's complicated, contradictory power." (Los Angeles Times)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9780771084348

Colm Toibin

Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, including Long Island; 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; The Testament of Mary; and Nora Webster; as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and has been named as the Laureate for Irish Fiction for 2022–2024 by the Arts Council of Ireland. Three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York.

Reviews for The Empty Family

[laura400 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I thought this collection was good but uneven. To me, the stories were all over the map, some bland, some brave and frank, some so-so, some good. The explicit sex in two stories may not be to everyone's taste. On the other hand, those were also two of the better stories in my opinion. It's nice to read work from Toibin that features contemporary settings, and in some cases characters who are out gay men. That's a nice change of pace from his wonderful fiction set in the past. I just wish I liked more of the stories here.

[gayla.bassham · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Well-written but uneven. I wanted to love it, but I barely liked it. I am in a real reading slump lately! It feels like it's been weeks since I really liked anything!

[presto_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If the stories in this collection have one thing in common, it is solitude. Many on the protagonists are alone, perhaps they were once in a relationship, perhaps they just prefer it that way, yet there is an air of melancholy that seems to pervade each story.Many of the stories feature a central gay male character, and a few of the stories are explicit. The final story and the longest centres on a young Pakistani immigrant in Spain living in a closed community of fellow immigrants. It differs from the majority of the stories in this collection in that here we follow a developing relationship as Malik, the younger man, develops an attachment to the older Abdul. It is a story fraught with difficulties, not helped by Abdul's reticence, yet it is a beautiful and touching account.The Empty Family is a fine collection of short stories, very perceptive, involving and moving, above all the they are beautifully written, drawing the reader into the private worlds of the participants, and as such they are deeply affecting.

[ebt1002 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a mixed bag of short stories. A couple of them earn about 1.5 or 2 stars from me, but a few earn closer to 4 or even 4.5 stars. The end result? An okay collection worth working one's way through but with disappointments as well as rewards. "Silence" was forgettable. "The Empty Family" was a five-star short story, a wonderfully wrought first-person narrative with some lovely language: "I wish I knew how colours came to be made. Some days when I was teaching I looked out the window and thought that everything I was saying was easy to find out and had already been surmised." Ah yes; I completely resonated with this. "Two Women" was poignant, engaging, interesting. "One Minus One" -- meh. "The Pearl Fishers" is a complex exploration of identity, sexuality, choices. The female character was disappointingly one-dimensional and shallow, but that is part of Tóibín's point here..... This story has one of my favorite sentences: "The future is a foreign country; they do things differently there." "Barcelona, 1975" is simply a memoir of a young adult love affair, extremely explicit and (homo)erotic. I don't know that it's profound, but it's courageous. In "The New Spain," Carme returns to Spain after 8 years away as a political activist in the UK -- our theme is the resolution of political commitment with family tradition, communism vs. inheritance of family wealth (and the resolution is less than fully comfortable on an individual level). "The Colour of Shadows" is an excellent entry. Paul visits his aunt, who raised him, at a nursing home and spends time with her as she approaches her death. He makes a bold promise to her -- and finds a surprising peace. Finally, "The Street" is the piece de resistance and singly makes the collection worthwhile. Malik is a young immigrant from Pakistan, making his way in Barcelona where he neither speaks the language nor understands the customs. At the mercy of Baldy, who makes arrangements and interacts with local officials, Malik finds himself emotionally and sexually drawn to the silent Abdul. After a tragic and brutal night, the two men face possible deportation or alienation from their small conservative community of barely-legal immigrants trying to make a living in this unfamiliar social and economic terrain. I'm avoiding spoilers here, but if you obtain this collection of short stories and simply skip to this one, so be it. This final story, all by itself, added a half-star to the collection's rating.

[eachurch-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Colm Toibin is one of my favorite writer. This collection of short stories confirms my high esteem for him. In these stories, he uses precise language to tell complex stories in a deceptively simple manner. The range of the stories is remarkable as his Toibin's ability to portray the inner workings of diverse characters.

[ireadthereforeiam · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I was unable to feel much for this book through the first half. Although the writing was lovely, the stories told couldn't carry me along. But, about half way the stories changed from family relationships to sexual relationships. The excitement and promise that a new relationship holds is what got me interested. Although the sexual part of the more often than not gay relationships was fairy graphically described, it didn't come over as sleazy and it offered me a window into lives I have no experience of.The final story is a lot longer than the rest and had the makings of a novel all its own. It describes the forbidden relationship between two Muslim men living in Barcelona. They are involved in a scam whereby they are working off the cost of passage home in advance of the actual trip. They are living in overcrowded shared rooms, and are at the mercy of their boss who controls every aspect of their lives. When the boss comes across two men in an intimate situation, he reacts violently which of course is the source of much fear and uncertainly of future for the men involved. Even though this story didn't end the way I expected or wanted, it was a special portrayal of cultural dislocation and dislocation within culture. This story I rated 4 stars, but the entire collection 3.5 stars.

[ameise1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was my second [[Tóibín]]'s reading and I liked it very much. This is a book full of short stories. What all the main characters have in common is that they have a special family background, childhood or adolescence and also some of them are gay. The scenery where the stories are taking place are Ireland or Spain (mostly Barcelona). In any case, there is a lot of love for each protagonist and his story. It's written very carefully and as a reader I got soon the impression to be familiar with all of them.

[trapnel · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Empty Family is Toibin’s second volume of short stories. The previous series (Mothers and Sons) focussed on one specific aspect of family relationships. The Mother-Son relationship features in this volume as well - however, most of these stories focu...s on broader aspects of what it means to exist in a family, or to exist without one. Toibin writes beautifully, and his books repay careful reading. He is reflective, and often somewhat downbeat. Small observations have great significance, and sometimes what is omitted or unseen is as important as what is written. A number of these stories include strong elements of his own experience, discernible from knowledge of his previous biographical writings. Many, but not all, reflect on being a gay man, and this writing may be uncomfortably explicit for some readers. However, Toibin’s writing continues to accumulate admirers and his reputation to rise, and this book will only add to that process.

[nbarman_5 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really liked this book. Toibin writes in a sparse, quiet fashion but it hits home. The last story, "The Street" was absolutely beautiful. Toibin's portrayal of Pakistani immigrant men living in Madrid was spot on. Reading it was so authentic that I would have mistaken Toibin for being a South Asian writer. This is a gentle book, beautifully written. Savor it.

[cariola_6 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Toibin presents nine moving stories about love, loss, and longing that span decades, eras, countries, and lifestyles. The effect of such diversity is the recognition of the emotions we all share. In the opening story, Lady Gregory, young wife of an older and no longer terribly interested husband, falls into a dangerous and short-lived affair with a married poet. Two of the stories deal with young men handling the deaths of the mother figures in their lives. In "One Minus One," a young Irish man, now living in Texas, recalls his earlier return to Dublin for his mother's funeral and the loss of his gay lover. In "The Colour of Shadows," Paul, a young gay Irishman, must take responsibility for the last days of the aunt who raised him as she falls deeper into Alzheimer's and ill health. Aunt Josie tends to forget who he is, and when she remembers, she expresses rigid disapproval of his lifestyle. "Two Women" features an elderly, cantankerous but renowned set designer who returns to Dublin to work on what may be her last film. Along the way, she finds herself reminiscing about an early love. The longest and perhaps most touching story in the collection, "The Street" focuses on two Pakistani men who fall in love while working under exploitive conditions in post-Franco Barcelona.Toibin's gentle, poetic prose hits just the right notes for each of these stories. He reminds us that, even though we inevitably realize that love is not necessarily forever, it's part of the human condition to yearn for it, seek for it, bring it back to life within our hearts and minds, if only as the shadow of a memory.

[hagelstein_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In the nine riveting stories that make up The Empty Family, Colm Toibin creates people that are exiles, expatriates, and those that are uncomfortable wherever they are. Some are returning to Ireland, or Spain, only to find their countries or families almost unrecognizable. Some are gay and unable to publicly acknowledge their love. Toibin’s characters all display a vulnerability belied by an underlying strength.The Street is an intricate, nuanced story of two homesick and lonely Pakistani laborers in Barcelona who strain against the taboos of their community to express their love in a country where they are all viewed with suspicion. In The New Spain a former communist that fled to London under Franco’s government returns to Spain a decade later to find her family has fully embraced the financial freedoms of democracy.