Colm Tóibín

In his essay about the life of Irish writer John McGahern, Tóibìn reveals the tones of melancholy and amusement within both art and the artist. In his extraordinary essay on his cancer diagnosis, Tóibìn unpicks the word 'battle', and illuminates the distress, horror and blankness of his experiences.

From the shades of light and dark in a Venice without tourists, to the streets of Buenos Aires riddled with disappearances and tied up with dictators and politics, we find ourselves considering law and religion in Ireland as well as in Marilynne Robinson's fiction. 

A Guest at the Feast reveals the places where politics and poetics meet, where life and fiction overlap, where one can be inside writing and also outside of it. The imprint of the written word on the private self, as Tóibìn himself remarks, is extraordinarily powerful. In this collection, that power is gloriously alive, illuminating history and literature, politics and power, family and the self.

In Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know, Colm Tóibín turns his incisive gaze to three of Ireland's greatest writers, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, and their earliest influences: their fathers. From Wilde's doctor father, a brilliant statistician and amateur archaeologist, who was taken to court by an obsessed lover in a strange premonition of what would happen to his son; to Yeats' father, an impoverished artist and brilliant letter writer who could never finish a painting; to John Stanislus Joyce, a singer, drinker and storyteller, a man unwilling to provide for his large family, whom his son James memorialised in his work.