--- product_id: 62678564 title: "The Empty Family: Stories (Bestselling Short Stories)" price: "R896" currency: ZAR in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.co.za/products/62678564-the-empty-family-stories-bestselling-short-stories store_origin: ZA region: South Africa --- # The Empty Family: Stories (Bestselling Short Stories) **Price:** R896 **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** The Empty Family: Stories (Bestselling Short Stories) - **How much does it cost?** R896 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.co.za](https://www.desertcart.co.za/products/62678564-the-empty-family-stories-bestselling-short-stories) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description The bestselling and award-winning author of Brooklyn , Colm Tóibín, returns with a stunning collection of stories—“a book that’s both a perfect introduction to Tóibín and, for longtime fans, a bracing pleasure” ( The Seattle Times ). Critics praised Brooklyn as a “beautifully rendered portrait of Brooklyn and provincial Ireland in the 1950s.” In The Empty Family , Tóibín has extended his imagination further, offering an incredible range of periods and characters—people linked by love, loneliness, desire—“the unvarying dilemmas of the human heart” ( The Observer , London). In the breathtaking long story “The Street,” Tóibín imagines a relationship between Pakistani workers in Barcelona—a taboo affair in a community ruled by obedience and silence. In “Two Women,” an eminent and taciturn Irish set designer takes a job in her homeland and must confront emotions she has long repressed. “Silence” is a brilliant historical set piece about Lady Gregory, who tells the writer Henry James a confessional story at a dinner party. The Empty Family will further cement Tóibín’s status as “his generation’s most gifted writer of love’s complicated, contradictory power” ( Los Angeles Times ). Review: The Power of Colm Tóibín's Prose - THE EMPTY ROOM is a priceless collection of short stories from the brilliant author Colm Tóibín. It could be easily said that once hooked on Tóibín's writing the bond is permanent. This exquisite collection is a series of indecisive moments in the lives of folk who are well into middle life, shackled between remembered emotion and the inevitable aging tranquility that is their future. He creates a panorama of characters about whom we come to know and with whom we empathize, but at the same time these created people are laid out on the near-necropsy postmortem table for us to touch and examine and step away. The nine stories included in this volume include 'Silence', a story transplanted to another time in which a Lady Gregory, an abandoned widow who has lost her recent lover, has a peppery dinner conversation with Henry James. In 'The New Spain', 'exiles return to bury loved ones, and ruminate on what other past associates might be up to. A Leftist dissident from Franco's Spain comes back home to a cool reception at the family villa in Menorca.' 'The Pearl Fishers' is a "grim, almost plotless thriller with gay subplots" and "overwrought and graphically violent screenplays." Our hero is invited to have dinner with a married couple, a man named Donnacha and a woman named Grainne, both of whom he has known since they were at school together decades earlier. The two boys (as they were then) were lovers before Donnacha linked up with the fiery, strong-willed Grainne, a religious reformer who has gained some notoriety by insisting "that she and other like-minded lay people represented the true Catholic Church more than the bishops and priests." Much of what we read in The Empty Family is Tóibín's apparent obsessive interest in 'the principal torments available to the educated, Left-leaning, upwardly mobile, male baby boomer in middle age. The men and women who brought us up, and bustled us off to the good schools they never got to attend, will weaken and die, and our professional success won't help them or us deal with that.' For this reader the most compelling story is the very genteel love story represented in 'The Street' - a tale of Pakistani immigrants in Barcelona who somehow survive the threat of being outsiders and in the case of Malik and Abdul discover their same sex needs and find some fulfillment despite the narrow confines of living in a hostile world. Colm Tóibín is a Master Craftsman, a wordsmith without peer, and everything he touches radiates a magic that only he is capable of transforming ordinary lives into extraordinary experiences for the reader. This, then, is literary genius. Grady Harp, September 11 Review: Love Ceaselessly Beckons - In a hyper-connected world, where friends, family, and even people we hardly know are only a text, Skype, email, Poke, Tweet, Re-tweet, IM, or call away, there is something about willed isolation, the desire to remain cut-off and removed from the heartbeat of anything resembling a loving community that is all the more chilling. Colm Toibin, in this collection of short fiction, has managed a masterful array of stories, and a collage of characters that unveil with melancholic ardor the pain, loss, and empty hearts of people who have refused, run away from, or been denied love. Love lingers in their lives like an open wound, borne from an encounter decades ago. Toibin- like with "Brooklyn" and "The Master" - in these works displays deft restraint. His prose is terse and powerful. His characters' pain is the simple product of a series of wrong turns- that combined and compounded into something more. Central to almost every character in these stories is a lack of reconciliation with the past. Toibin's characters are running- from pain, love lost, truth, loneliness, confusion, time. With each passing decade, the onion adds layers. Toibin gives readers of "The Empty Family" first the mature, ripe onion- followed by a series of glimpses into its core. In this way, the structure of Toibin's stories mimic the rhythm and construction of memory. Nothing is more detailed than now. But the emotion of the past, we cannot escape. The impact of moments, whose importance only grow with age, become more clear, and sometimes painful, in the repeating now. The past emerges to the surface like the first, petite bubbles in a pot of stovetop water that is about to turn over into a violent boil. Frances, in "Two Women", is in the twilight of her life and career. She is a woman "that did not allow herself to feel pain." Frances, on a trip for work to Ireland, is reminded of her 12-year love affair with a man named Luke. "Besides her career, nothing interested her now except her house and her own mind." But for Frances, like so many characters in these stories, the house and mind are not a place of growth and expansion, but rather of retreat. It is a place Frances goes to hide. She resigns from the vulnerability of love in the familiar and routine machinations of her work. Luke was a big decision in her life that she fumbled; and now it haunts her. Through the pain and loss that Toibin orchestrates with the touch of a puppeteer in these stories, through the absence of love, we are given perhaps the most powerful testament of its presence. Love ceaselessly beckons through the void. "The Empty Family" unveils, in all its subtle splendors, this tug of war between the safeness and isolation of a life without love versus the allure and vulnerability of one where love is present. Toibin offers us a powerful portrait of the ruinous effects of a hardened heart on the soul; and in so doing, champions the importance of an open and ever mindful heart. ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #1,085,506 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #878 in LGBTQ+ Literary Fiction (Books) #5,697 in Short Stories (Books) #17,129 in Literary Fiction (Books) | | Customer Reviews | 4.1 out of 5 stars 645 Reviews | ## Images ![The Empty Family: Stories (Bestselling Short Stories) - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81V0tS-dFzL.jpg) ## Available Options This product comes in different **Media Format** options. ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Power of Colm Tóibín's Prose *by G***P on September 28, 2011* THE EMPTY ROOM is a priceless collection of short stories from the brilliant author Colm Tóibín. It could be easily said that once hooked on Tóibín's writing the bond is permanent. This exquisite collection is a series of indecisive moments in the lives of folk who are well into middle life, shackled between remembered emotion and the inevitable aging tranquility that is their future. He creates a panorama of characters about whom we come to know and with whom we empathize, but at the same time these created people are laid out on the near-necropsy postmortem table for us to touch and examine and step away. The nine stories included in this volume include 'Silence', a story transplanted to another time in which a Lady Gregory, an abandoned widow who has lost her recent lover, has a peppery dinner conversation with Henry James. In 'The New Spain', 'exiles return to bury loved ones, and ruminate on what other past associates might be up to. A Leftist dissident from Franco's Spain comes back home to a cool reception at the family villa in Menorca.' 'The Pearl Fishers' is a "grim, almost plotless thriller with gay subplots" and "overwrought and graphically violent screenplays." Our hero is invited to have dinner with a married couple, a man named Donnacha and a woman named Grainne, both of whom he has known since they were at school together decades earlier. The two boys (as they were then) were lovers before Donnacha linked up with the fiery, strong-willed Grainne, a religious reformer who has gained some notoriety by insisting "that she and other like-minded lay people represented the true Catholic Church more than the bishops and priests." Much of what we read in The Empty Family is Tóibín's apparent obsessive interest in 'the principal torments available to the educated, Left-leaning, upwardly mobile, male baby boomer in middle age. The men and women who brought us up, and bustled us off to the good schools they never got to attend, will weaken and die, and our professional success won't help them or us deal with that.' For this reader the most compelling story is the very genteel love story represented in 'The Street' - a tale of Pakistani immigrants in Barcelona who somehow survive the threat of being outsiders and in the case of Malik and Abdul discover their same sex needs and find some fulfillment despite the narrow confines of living in a hostile world. Colm Tóibín is a Master Craftsman, a wordsmith without peer, and everything he touches radiates a magic that only he is capable of transforming ordinary lives into extraordinary experiences for the reader. This, then, is literary genius. Grady Harp, September 11 ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Love Ceaselessly Beckons *by F***N on January 26, 2011* In a hyper-connected world, where friends, family, and even people we hardly know are only a text, Skype, email, Poke, Tweet, Re-tweet, IM, or call away, there is something about willed isolation, the desire to remain cut-off and removed from the heartbeat of anything resembling a loving community that is all the more chilling. Colm Toibin, in this collection of short fiction, has managed a masterful array of stories, and a collage of characters that unveil with melancholic ardor the pain, loss, and empty hearts of people who have refused, run away from, or been denied love. Love lingers in their lives like an open wound, borne from an encounter decades ago. Toibin- like with "Brooklyn" and "The Master" - in these works displays deft restraint. His prose is terse and powerful. His characters' pain is the simple product of a series of wrong turns- that combined and compounded into something more. Central to almost every character in these stories is a lack of reconciliation with the past. Toibin's characters are running- from pain, love lost, truth, loneliness, confusion, time. With each passing decade, the onion adds layers. Toibin gives readers of "The Empty Family" first the mature, ripe onion- followed by a series of glimpses into its core. In this way, the structure of Toibin's stories mimic the rhythm and construction of memory. Nothing is more detailed than now. But the emotion of the past, we cannot escape. The impact of moments, whose importance only grow with age, become more clear, and sometimes painful, in the repeating now. The past emerges to the surface like the first, petite bubbles in a pot of stovetop water that is about to turn over into a violent boil. Frances, in "Two Women", is in the twilight of her life and career. She is a woman "that did not allow herself to feel pain." Frances, on a trip for work to Ireland, is reminded of her 12-year love affair with a man named Luke. "Besides her career, nothing interested her now except her house and her own mind." But for Frances, like so many characters in these stories, the house and mind are not a place of growth and expansion, but rather of retreat. It is a place Frances goes to hide. She resigns from the vulnerability of love in the familiar and routine machinations of her work. Luke was a big decision in her life that she fumbled; and now it haunts her. Through the pain and loss that Toibin orchestrates with the touch of a puppeteer in these stories, through the absence of love, we are given perhaps the most powerful testament of its presence. Love ceaselessly beckons through the void. "The Empty Family" unveils, in all its subtle splendors, this tug of war between the safeness and isolation of a life without love versus the allure and vulnerability of one where love is present. Toibin offers us a powerful portrait of the ruinous effects of a hardened heart on the soul; and in so doing, champions the importance of an open and ever mindful heart. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A terrific collection of great stories filled with moving situations and memorable characters (except maybe that title story) *by H***S on December 7, 2015* The book discussion group read this collection of stores in December 2015. We had a fairly small group (which is great for discussion), who most enthusiastically liked or loved the book. The first story, "Silence," is a rather ornate return to the Henry James period and approach that Toibin used in "The Master," a novel that we genuinely loved when we read it in the group. The rest of the stories in the collection, however, are contemporary and many are much more sexually explicit. So, while this is a very fine story, it might be a bit of a false start for the collection. The stories (including the first, anomalous story) revolve around familial relationships, uncovering how families interact, and often exploring troubled or failed relationships. Many of the major characters are lonely and alienated from their families. They long to return to their families, usually in Ireland. Physically returning home is a common theme. In the final story ("The Street"), the statement "...my real family is you," sums up the families that number of the characters create for themselves. One of the things that separates short stories from novels is the tight number of characters in short stories. Toibin creates vivid and memorable characters: a flinty older art director ("Two Women"); two young men who had an affair years ago and meet again later, with one of them married to a woman journalist ("The Pearl Fishers"); a young man and his first lover, whom he loses ("Barcelona, 1975"); a gay man raised by his very opinionated but loving aunt ("The Color of Shadows"), a "bad" communist and her controlling mother ("The New Spain"), and the two Pakistani men who find each other under difficult circumstances ("The Street"). Another point is that novels are often processes and involve multiple changes, but stories are built around a single image, and the stronger the image appears in the story, the stronger the story seems. Images in these stories include a conversation between two women in a pub ("Two Women"); three characters having dinner in a fancy restaurant and one of the characters walking home alone ("The Pearl Fishers"); a gay orgy in a warren of rooms ("Barcelona, 1975"), an old sea-side home with tourist cottages built nearby, as well as a refrigerator chained shut ("The New Spain"), and finally a free concert filled with young Pakistani men, and later, two Pakistani men, one older and one younger, walking along the beach ("The Street"). I couldn't get a grasp on the title story, "The Empty Family." While full of beautiful imagery, I could never figure out the relationships between the characters or tell what had happened before the story began. A few too many of the stories use a dying parent or guardian as the central conceit of the story ("One Minus One", "The New Spain," and "The Colour of Shadows"). But I'm just pointing out quibbles. The stories are uniformly beautiful and sensuous and memorable. Colm Toibin is fabulous. --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.co.za/products/62678564-the-empty-family-stories-bestselling-short-stories](https://www.desertcart.co.za/products/62678564-the-empty-family-stories-bestselling-short-stories) --- *Product available on Desertcart South Africa* *Store origin: ZA* *Last updated: 2026-08-14*