Nora Webster (Toibin)

Book Reviews
Colm Toibin's high-wire act of an eighth novel…is written without a single physical description of its characters or adverbial signpost to guide our interpretation of their speech. The emotional distance between protagonist and reader is so great that at times the title character seems almost spectral. Yet it is precisely Toibin's radical restraint that elevates what might have been a familiar tale of grief and survival into a realm of heightened inquiry. The result is a luminous, elliptical novel in which everyday life manages, in moments, to approach the mystical.
Jennifer Egan - New York Times Book Review


Miraculous… a strikingly restrained novel about a woman awakening from grief and discovering her own space, her own will…extraordinary... [Toibin] portrays Nora with tremendous sympathy and understanding.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


Toibin’s restraint, sly humor and gentle prose cadence echo those of another Irish master, William Trevor. So does his affection for his characters… How Nora chooses to make her voice heard and how her children find ways to express their own pain provide Nora Webster’s plot and pleasure…a so-called average life can make for a thrilling read…Toibin presents one woman’s life keenly observed and honored with compassion. With Enniscorthy, he also creates a town, constrained and forever behind the times though it is, that feels like the whole world.
Miami Herald


[A] quietly moving study of a complex character and her ambiguous feelings toward the web of family and neighbors surrounding her in the small town of Enniscorthy…. All his books share precise, restrained prose, which can, in its simplicity, reach elegance.
Maya Muir - Portland Oregonian


Toibin artfully shows us a Nora unmoored…This quiet, wrenching novel conceals considerable human turbulence beneath its placid surface. So Toibin has learned well from Henry James…In many ways, Nora Webster would bring an admiring smile to the Master’s lips.
Daniel Dyer - Cleveland Plain Dealer


Fascinating... Revelatory... More thoughtful than Emma Bovary and less self-destructive, in the end far and away a better parent than the doomed Anna Karenina for all the latter’s dramatic posturing, Nora Webster is easily as memorable as either—and far more believable. To say more would spoil a masterful— and unforgettable—novel.
Betsy Burton - NPR


[C]ompelling portrait of an Irish woman for whom fate has prescribed loneliness...until [she] gradually finds an unexpected fulfillment in a talent she had never acknowledged. Toibin never employs dramatic fireworks to add an artificial boost to the narrative.... [Nora] she remains a brave woman learning how to find a meaningful life as she goes on alone.
Publishers Weekly


The Ireland of four decades ago is beautifully evoked… Completely absorbing [and] remarkably heart-affecting.
Booklist


Nora Webster is widowed at 40, with four sons in her care and little money to support them. She's desperate to retain her independence and so grief-stricken that she barely registers how much her sons need her. But gradually she returns to singing, which she had abandoned years before, and finds herself. The multi-award-winning Toibin has a gift for portraiture.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) A subtle, pitch-perfect sonata of a novel.... Nora exists in a "world filled with absences." ... A novel of mourning, healing and awakening; its plainspoken eloquence never succumbs to the sentimentality its heroine would reject.
Kirkus Reviews