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, UK).

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 ).