The News from Dublin: Colm Tóibín’s latest short story collection resonates with emotional truth

Colm Tóibín’s latest collection of short stories delivers a quietly powerful collection of nine stories that traverse Ireland, Spain, Argentina and the US. The News from Dublin offers intimate portraits of people shaped by history, disappointment, tragedy, grief and the long shadows of secrecy. These narratives favour restraint over spectacle, revealing emotional truths through subtle gestures, silences and missed connections.

Several stories are rooted in Ireland’s past, foregrounding families and communities under pressure. The Journey to Galway, set during the first world war, follows a mother travelling by train to deliver the telegram announcing her son’s death to his wife, and the impact of the war on the home front.

The drama lies not in external events but in her internal reckoning with grief, duty and the weight of carrying devastating news that will shatter the lives of her family and grandchildren. Tóibín’s spare prose mirrors the emotional austerity of the moment, highlighting how tragedy reverberates through ordinary lives.

A Sum of Money similarly explores Irish social realities, focusing on poverty and moral ambiguity. The young protagonist’s thefts at a religious boarding school are portrayed with empathy rather than condemnation, revealing how deprivation and shame can warp childhood.

The muted reaction when he is discovered and expelled from the school underscores a recurring motif in the collection: the unsaid, the unresolved, and the quiet accommodation of wrongdoing within institutions and families.

In the titular story, The News from Dublin, a schoolteacher’s attempt to navigate the complexities of local politics to secure experimental treatment for his sick brother results in him returning home unable to deliver the much hoped-for news. The absence of “news” is itself the story’s emotional climax, reflecting the moral complexities of familial duty, disappointment and avoidance.

Beyond Ireland, Tóibín examines themes of migration and displacement. Five Bridges follows an undocumented Irish immigrant in San Francisco returning to Ireland after three decades in the US.

His last weekend with his American daughter becomes a poignant reckoning with belonging, fatherhood and the precarity of immigrant life, framed against the spectre of contemporary US immigration raids and law enforcement under Donald Trump’s second term as president. The story captures the solidarity and belonging of diasporic and expatriate communities living precarious lives.

Sleep and Barton Springs delve into grief and sexuality with subtlety. In Sleep, a gay man’s relationship with his lover falters under the strain of his unresolved grief about his deceased brother, prompting a journey back to Dublin for therapy. The story delicately probes how cultural identity shapes the articulation of pain and trauma.

Barton Springs, the shortest story in the collection, also concerns a man grieving the death of his brother and offers a fleeting, sensuous moment of connection amid grief when one swimmer is transfixed in admiration of the physical beauty of another.

The Spanish stories in the collection introduce broader political and historical dimensions. Summer of ’38, narrated by an elderly Marta, reflects on a youthful affair during the Spanish civil war and the lifelong consequences of concealed parentage. Her silence about her daughter’s father encapsulates the collection’s recurring tension between truth and secrecy.

A Free Man, set in Barcelona, is perhaps the most unsettling story: an Irish ex-prisoner unrepentant about his crimes attempts to establish a new life in Spain free from detection. The narrative forces readers to confront moral discomfort without offering easy judgement, echoing biblical and existential motifs.

The collection concludes with The Catalan Girls, a novella-length story that presents a richly layered family saga centred on three sisters whose lives unfold across Spain and Argentina. Narrated from the perspective of the youngest sister, Montse, the story examines sisterhood, sibling rivalry, family poverty and the fragile formation of female identity in patriarchal societies.

The story ends with Montse stealing her sister’s Spanish passport so that she may have a life of independence and financial freedom away from her sisters. This act of betrayal becomes a powerful symbol of her self-preservation and defiance.

Across these stories, Tóibín returns to recurring themes: the burdens of history, the complexities of family and sexuality, the scars of poverty and migration, and the quiet tragedies of withheld truths. His prose is measured, empathetic and unsentimental, allowing readers to inhabit moral grey zones without overt authorial judgement.

The News from Dublin emerges as a complex collection of family histories and profound interior lives, rendered with quiet precision and emotional intelligence, and a set of stories that resonate strongly with contemporary political and social concerns.

Manjeet Ridon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.