On the heels of his bestselling and award-winning novel 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). In The Empty Family, Tóibín offers an incredible range of periods and characters - people linked by love, loneliness, desire - ‘the unvarying dilemmas of the human heart’ (The Observer). 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). “The work of a supreme writer who only improves.” - The Times