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. 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.
Gerard Doyle has appeared in London's West End in The Hired Man and in Shakespeare's Coriolanus and The Winter's Tale, and has toured nationally and internationally with the English Shakespeare Company. He has appeared on Broadway in The Weir and on television in New York Undercover and Law and Order. Mr. Doyle is also an award-winning audiobook narrator. "The snowy Pyrenees provide a stark setting for this spare audiobook. Following a confrontation, Miquel's mother goes missing. The novella examines the effects of this life-altering event, as well as the family's complex bonds. Gerard Doyle's performance is direct, clear, and well suited to the simplicity of Tóibín's prose...Fans of Tóibín's work won't be disappointed by this audiobook."
