**The bestselling and award-winning author of *Brooklyn* , Colm Tóibín, returns with a stunning collection of stories—“a book that’s both a perfect introduction to Tóibín and, for longtime fans, a bracing pleasure” ( *The Seattle Times* ).** 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* ).