The Bridge

A spare chronicle of longing and grief * Guardian *
He has an almost uncanny ability to inhabit the interior lives of his characters with an absolute lack of sentimentality or judgment * TLS *
What makes Tóibín one of our finest contemporary writers is his dual power as a fierce cultural critic and a novelist of immense, delicate intuition. He operates with a journalist’s eye for hard fact and a poet’s ear for the weight of a pause * New Yorker *
Deep sorrow mingles with illicit desire in this potent novella, the follow-up to a 2006 story about an isolated family in the Catalan mountains . . .Tóibín’s unsentimental prose is flawlessly matched to the austere worlds of people enduring, in their different ways, lives stripped back to the bone * The Guardian *
Tóibín evokes with a quiet force the sorrow of unfulfilled lives * Harper's Bazaar *
Ireland’s greatest living writer returns with a new 128-page novella . . . Tóibín is a master, because with just a few economic brushstrokes he tells the kind of profound tale of family connection and dislocation that other writers would struggle to tell in 500 pages * The i *
A small, beautiful book about betrayal, the cost of isolation and the persistence of human decency . . . The beauty of the novel lies not in the dramatic mountainous landscape or even in the slow, immersive style, but rather in the person of Miquel, whose gentle, uncomplaining, totally unselfconscious goodness is a kind of miracle – the triumph of virtue over fear and want and malicious manipulation * The Spectator *
A tiny gem . . . Perfect in its simplicity and skill * The Tablet *
Simmering with hidden desire and words unspoken, this compact story of smugglers in the Pyrenees unfolds with Toibin’s customary nuance . . . Taut with tension and tantalisingly unanswered questions * Daily Mail *