In plain and unsentimental prose, Toibin gives us the story of a woman, Nora Webster, whose husband of many years has died. Leaving her alone, with two younger boys and two older daughters, she must find her way through life for herself and her children. Like Brooklyn, Tóibín’s great novel of an Irishwoman’s exile, Nora Webster is animated by a death in the family. But where Eilis Lacey becomes reaffirmed by her loss, Nora Webster, who is also a strong and intelligent woman, must find a new strength through a more painful, private colloquy with herself. Death, Tóibín seems to be saying, is a bigger bereavement than exile. Although Nora loves her children, she’s consumed by her grief and doesn’t give them the attention they need. The children all miss their father, but they miss Nora just as much because she shuts them out. Everyone in the family craves some normality and emotional stability, but unfortunately, things are about to get worse for the Websters.

The novelists have become characters in their own books. By the urgency of the tone, they make clear, however, that, in the aftermath of loss, nothing they can invent compares to it. And that, since they are writers, what happened needs to be written down so that it can be known and shared and understood, so that it can lose its incoherence. And so that they, in their powerlessness and helplessness, can at least still do this, can at least write down what it was like. The loss is complex, or it comes in a complex guise. People think she wants to talk about her dead husband, or be reminded of what she has lost. "They thought she hugged tight every memory she had of him. What did they know about memory?" She hopes for a time when she had "forgotten him for a minute". It is clear that the grief does not have to be named as "grief", or brought out for inspection. All she knows is that how she feels is not stable, it cannot be trusted. It is wayward. Brown, Mark (23 March 2015). "Akhil Sharma wins Folio prize for fiction". the Guardian . Retrieved 7 January 2022. Colm Tóibín is the author of ten novels, including The Magician, his most recent novel; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; The Testament of Mary; and Nora Webster, as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. Three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York. When we are told, en passant, about “Catholics marching for civil rights”, another character remarks: “That’s one scrap I wouldn’t like to be in. There will be no easy way out of that one.” But, as every historical novelist knows, lines loaded with history will always be at odds with the quest for “truth in the simplest detail”. Later, after another reference to “baton-charges”, we hear about the young Charles Haughey and his gun running. Then, towards the end, comes news of Bloody Sunday.

Aine moves to Dublin to become a political activist. Involved in violent riots, Aine is a constant source of worry for Nora. Fiona moves to Wexford to start her teaching career. Feeling lost without her daughters Nora wonders if she is responsible for letting her family fall apart. She realizes that she didn’t give them the support they needed after Maurice’s death, but she doesn’t know what to do about it now. But I must have sat up when I came to this passage in Lavin's story "Happiness": "When Father went to hospital Mother went with him and stayed in a small hotel across the street so she could be with him all day from early to late. 'Because it was so awful for him, being in Dublin,' she said. 'You have no idea how he hated it.' Maybe I thought this would be in other books in the future – such a precise image of what had happened to us – but I never found it again. It was only there. It is in the novel I have written, Nora Webster, but it took me a long time to find a dramatic form for those words. Sussler, Betsy (3 November 2014). "Awards: Irish Book; Banff Mountain". Shelf Awareness . Retrieved 7 January 2022.

This idea of the personality as suddenly protean under the pressure of loss belongs fundamentally to the literature of grief because, of course, it belongs to the experience. Slowly, his name ceased to be mentioned in the house. CS Lewis has a description of the same silence after his wife's death: "I cannot talk to the children about her. The moment I try, there appears on their faces neither grief, nor love, nor fear, nor pity, but the most fatal of non-conductors, embarrassment. They look as if I were committing an indecency. They are longing for me to stop. I felt just the same after my mother's death when my father mentioned her. I can't blame them. It's the way boys are."

Kirkus called Nora Webster "[a] novel of mourning, healing and awakening," noting that "its plainspoken eloquence never succumbs to the sentimentality its heroine would reject." [1] In Ireland, there is only one Nora – Nora Barnacle, James Joyce’s wife and muse. From its title outwards, Colm Tóibín’s new novel is all about Ireland and, in a larger sense, about an important contemporary Irish writer’s relationship with Joyce, whose work still throws such a long shadow across every angle of Irish literary life. Starred Review. A novel of mourning, healing and awakening; its plainspoken eloquence never succumbs to the sentimentality its heroine would reject." - Kirkus The writing of Lewis and Barnes and Oates about grief is deeply personal, precise and particular. The feeling they describe is unique because the person grieved over was unique. The loss happened only once. But the writing is also public; it does not come in diary form with many cryptic references. Its source is perhaps the very source of fiction itself – the mysterious and compulsive need to find a rhythm and an artful tone to suggest and communicate the most private feelings and imaginings and facts to someone else, to make sentences which will move from mirroring the writer to allowing the reader to catch a more intense glimpse of the world. Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth