Nora Webster - Format C - Tapa blanda

A fine companion piece to his acclaimed novel, Brooklyn . . . Mixing irony and nostalgia in its portrayal of a provincial Irish town. Subtle and enthralling (Sunday Times, Books of the Year)

Tóibín's measured prose and close attention to emotional nuance is shown at its best here (Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year)

This is his best yet. The ache of a widow's grief is rendered with such an unadorned intensity that you might not think the book could be entertaining too, but it is (Spectator, Books of the Year)

A clear-sighted yet sympathetic portrait of a woman destabilised by grief (Financial Times, Books of the Year)

So rich, so observant, so moving (Observer, Books of the Year)

Tender, delicately oblique in its narration, and exquisitely well-written (The Times)

A luminous, elliptical novel in which everyday life manages, in moments, to approach the mystical . . . There is much about Nora Webster that we never know. And her very mystery is what makes her regeneration, when it comes, feel universal (Jennifer Egan New York Times)

Beautiful and heartbreaking. It's so richly detailed and laced with such dialogue that you feel like you are living in Nora's world (Independent)

Arresting. As this novel movingly proposes, there are no ordinary women and no ordinary lives (Irish Indendent)

The story is so expertly crafted that it achieves a luminous intensity, which lingers long in the memory (Mail on Sunday)

"it is the late 1960s in Ireland. Nora Webster is living in a small town, looking after her four children, trying to rebuild her life after the death of her husband.