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The Bridge
- Author
- Colm Tóibín
- Narrator
- Colm Tóibín
- Publisher
- Pan Macmillan
- Publish Date
- 3 September 2026
- Run Time
- 2 hours 22 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
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What to expect
From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Long Island
'A writer at the height of his considerable powers' – The Guardian
'A giant amongst storytellers' – The Telegraph
'One of our finest contemporary writers' – New Yorker
Beautifully read by the author, Colm Tóibín.
Miquel and his father are living an uneasy life together in his mother's house in the Pyrenees, the house she had been returning to on the day she died. A new bridge, connecting the two valleys, is almost complete, which will end the valley's isolation and create an easier route to smuggle contraband deep into the mountains. Where Miquel's father imagines opportunity, Miquel foresees disaster and an exposure to the outside world for which his father is desperately unprepared.
Colm Tóibín's exhilarating short novel contains vast inner and outer worlds within its pages. With meticulous precision and an unerring eye Tóibín captures lives caught between the past and the present, and the journey of a young man seeking connection, haunted by loss.
Critics Review
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A spare chronicle of longing and grief
Guardian
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He has an almost uncanny ability to inhabit the interior lives of his characters with an absolute lack of sentimentality or judgment
TLS
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What makes Tóibín one of our finest contemporary writers is his dual power as a fierce cultural critic and a novelist of immense, delicate intuition. He operates with a journalist’s eye for hard fact and a poet’s ear for the weight of a pause
New Yorker
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Deep sorrow mingles with illicit desire in this potent novella, the follow-up to a 2006 story about an isolated family in the Catalan mountains . . . Tóibín’s unsentimental prose is flawlessly matched to the austere worlds of people enduring, in their different ways, lives stripped back to the bone
The Guardian
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Tóibín evokes with a quiet force the sorrow of unfulfilled lives
Harper's Bazaar
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Ireland’s greatest living writer returns with a new 128-page novella . . . Tóibín is a master, because with just a few economic brushstrokes he tells the kind of profound tale of family connection and dislocation that other writers would struggle to tell in 500 pages
The i
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A small, beautiful book about betrayal, the cost of isolation and the persistence of human decency . . . The beauty of the novel lies not in the dramatic mountainous landscape or even in the slow, immersive style, but rather in the person of Miquel, whose gentle, uncomplaining, totally unselfconscious goodness is a kind of miracle – the triumph of virtue over fear and want and malicious manipulation
The Spectator
User Reviews
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Details
- Author
- Colm Tóibín
- Narrator
- Colm Tóibín
- Duration
- 2 hours 22 minutes
- Release Date
- 3 September 2026
- ISBN
- 9781037418556
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Pan Macmillan
- Genre
- Fiction: literary and general non-genre, Historical fiction, Family life fiction / Stories about family, Narrative theme: death, grief, loss
Synopsis
From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Long Island'A writer at the height of his considerable powers' – The Guardian'A giant amongst storytellers' – The Telegraph'One of our finest contemporary writers' – New YorkerBeautifully read by the author, Colm Tóibín.Miquel and his father are living an uneasy life together in his mother's house in the Pyrenees, the house she had been returning to on the day she died. A new bridge, connecting the two valleys, is almost complete, which will end the valley's isolation and create an easier route to smuggle contraband deep into the mountains. Where Miquel's father imagines opportunity, Miquel foresees disaster and an exposure to the outside world for which his father is desperately unprepared.Colm Tóibín's exhilarating short novel contains vast inner and outer worlds within its pages. With meticulous precision and an unerring eye Tóibín captures lives caught between the past and the present, and the journey of a young man seeking connection, haunted by loss.
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