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Book Summary and Reviews of A Long Winter by Colm Toibin

A Long Winter by Colm Toibin

A Long Winter

by Colm Toibin

  • Published:
  • Nov 2025, 144 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

Available for the first time in a beautiful stand-alone edition, one of Colm Tóibín's finest short stories and "the most striking example of Tóibín's emotional control" (The Guardian). A Long Winter is set in the mountains of Catalonia in Spain—this edition includes a new afterword by the author on how he came to write the story.

A young man named Miquel returns to his family in the Catalan Pyrenees upon completing his military service. His younger brother, Jordi, will be departing for his service a week after Miquel's arrival. He will be gone for two years. Miquel notices their mother's increasingly erratic behavior and understands that she is drinking.

As she becomes increasingly unstable, her husband resorts to drastic measures. Unable to abide his betrayal and her own grief, she walks off into the mountains. A blizzard sets in and the search for her is futile. No one will find her until the spring thaw arrives.

A gorgeous story of loss, grief, and longing, A Long Winter describes an extraordinary bond between a mother and son and a haunting portrait of a family in crisis. Tóibín's powers of imagination and transfixing emotional insight are on full display.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"A stereophonic treat." —Irish Independent

This information about A Long Winter was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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More Information

Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, including Long Island, an Oprah's Book Club Pick; The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; and Nora Webster, winner of the Hawthornden Prize, as well as three story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and was named the 2022–2024 Laureate for Irish Fiction by the Arts Council of Ireland.In 2021, he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature.

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