A Guest at the Feast

Author Colm Toibin
Narrator Colm Tóibín
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Publish Date 3 November 2022
Run Time 9 hours and 38 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Biography and non-fiction prose, Literary essays, Literary studies: general, Memoirs.

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

In his essay about the life of Irish writer John McGahern, Tóibín reveals the tones of melancholy and amusement within both art and the artist. In his extraordinary essay on his cancer diagnosis, Tóibín unpicks the word 'battle', and illuminates the distress, horror and blankness of his experiences. From the shades of light and dark in a Venice without tourists, to the streets of Buenos Aires riddled with disappearances and tied up with dictators and politics, we find ourselves considering law and religion in Ireland as well as in Marilynne Robinson's fiction.

A Guest at the Feast reveals the places where politics and poetics meet, where life and fiction overlap, where one can be inside writing and also outside of it. The imprint of the written word on the private self, as Tóibín himself remarks, is extraordinarily powerful. In this collection, that power is gloriously alive, illuminating history and literature, politics and power, family and the self.

© Colm Tóibín 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Critics Review

Droll, careful reflections on Ireland, illness and religion in a welcome collection of essays . . . [the] melancholy elegance of the prose guarantees the reader’s enjoyment

Guardian

Erudite, forensic, moving and wry . . . the breadth of the collection is impressive: a snapshot of Irish society over decades; Buenos Aires, in the wake of thousands of ‘disappeared’ people; Covid-era Venice . . . a lesson in how the right words in the right order can get to the truth of the matter

Irish Times

[These essays] are always interesting and intelligent, written in an admirably clear prose free of academic jargon . . . journalism at its best. I learned a lot from them and am grateful for that. It’s a collection to which I will surely return, just as I do to Orwell’s, Ian Jack’s, Ferdinand Mount’s and Patrick Marnham’s

Scotsman

A feast for the reader . . . the novelist applies his inquisitive and empathetic mind in wide-ranging series of essays, from the political to the poignant . . . [Toibin] seeks no lessons; he tries only to be good company on the page. (He succeeds.)

Irish Independent

Erudite essays from one of the world’s finest writers . . . Throughout, the poetry of Tóibín’s prose is as impressive as always. In [the] title piece, he writes that his mother was ‘what most of us still write for: the ordinary reader, curious and intelligent and demanding, ready to be moved and changed.’ Readers like her will savor every page of this book

Kirkus Reviews, starred

The clarity of the novelist’s descriptive ability shines through essays on topics ranging from his treatment for cancer to the joys of an empty Venice . . . On every subject, Tóibín’s writing is what people these days inevitably describe as nuanced, a word that has become a kind of shorthand for expressing a person’s rare ability to understand . . . the foibles of others

Observer, Book of the Day

I love everything Colm Tóibín has written

New Statesman

I wanted to read out loud, to fully savour writing that is so careful and so lyrical

Sunday Times

Reading Irish novelist, playwright and poet Colm Tóibín is always a delight

Independent

Both epic and intimate . . . a moving portrait of three generations of sprawling, loving, fractious family life . . . a triumph

Financial Times on The Magician

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