Where to start with Colm Tóibín

Irish novelist, born 1955. Won the Costa Novel Award in 2009.

Best Colm Tóibín book to start with: Brooklyn (2009), on 2 of the 15 lists it could have made.

Brooklyn, which won the Costa Novel Award in 2009, is the best way into Tóibín. The lists place Long Island first, but it is a sequel, and it works best when you know what came before. Brooklyn follows a young Irishwoman who leaves her small town for New York in the 1950s. It is short and plain, and quietly moving.

Long Island, shortlisted for Fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2025, picks up more than twenty years later, so read it second.

Nora Webster, shortlisted for the Costa in 2014, follows a widow in a small Irish town in the 1960s and 70s, and it suits readers who liked the pace of Brooklyn. The Blackwater Lightship, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999, brings three generations of women together with a dying young man at a house on the coast. The Testament of Mary, shortlisted for the Booker in 2013, is a short monologue by the mother of Jesus.

The Master, shortlisted for the Booker in 2004, is a novel about Henry James, and The Magician, shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize in 2022, is about Thomas Mann. Both are more rewarding if you know something of the writers they portray.