Colm Tóibín returns to the Catalan Pyrenees in a new novella, The Bridge
Twenty years after A Long Winter, the Irish novelist follows the same isolated family into a story of forbidden love and quiet endurance, reviewed by the Guardian.
Colm Tóibín has published a follow-up to A Long Winter, the 2006 novella about a family in the high villages of the Catalan Pyrenees, according to the Guardian's review. The new book, The Bridge, picks up a year after the earlier story, in which a woman disappears into the snow and her son Miquel waits through winter for the thaw.
In The Bridge, Miquel is living with his harsh father on the family farm, the Guardian's review notes, scraping by on sheep-grazing and a smuggling side trade. Against this bare, unforgiving setting, a tender and forbidden relationship develops between Miquel and Manolo, his father's mistreated servant, which the review describes as the novella's emotional centre.
The Guardian characterises Tóibín's prose as restrained even when describing extreme hardship, a quality it traces back to A Long Winter, which first appeared as a standalone volume before being collected in Mothers and Sons in 2006.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
